eve and the two world trees
once upon a time the living and the dead were not different. Birth and death were not seen nor feared to be different. The living and the dead moved amongst each other in the same world, traveled the same paths, spoke face to face. The path of death; the milky way, and the path of life; that of the sun were one and the same.
once upon a time god alone created, held the creative powers, knew the craft of creation.
before time began his journey
before Nous began his journey after PsuXe's fleeing ripeness, dripping his seed like the ticking of times clock
before time began his journey after PsuXe, ecosystems created the myriad beings.
before Nous began to spin the sad tale of his awareness of time's passage after PsuXe fled from his awakening, and he gave chase, there was only one creator. She was Earth and she created the myriad beings within herself by letting in the seeds of random flux, letting them enter her own flesh and creating folds around themselves for wombs, letting them play against each other in the game of natural selection. Inviting birth and death into her own flesh generation after generation. But she too had no companion.
before the tale of time spun 'round the world tree
before the path of life and the path of death diverged, there was one world tree of birth and death around which the world revolved in timeless eternal orbit. at equilibrium. Then death, the giver of chance, of mutation, the giver of novelty, offered Eve the forbidden fruit.
And what fruit was it? The pomegranate, convoluted fruit like the cerebral cortex, in the image of mother Earth's folds of flesh around the seeds of creation. So Death offered Eve this convoluted fruit, mass of neurons, the pandora's box dense enough to catch the seeds of random flux herself and wrap wombs of thought about them, give them whole worlds of her own imagining to play in and create ecosystems
once Demeter, giver of live, fertility of decaying mud lost her daughter Persephone to Dis, deep in the dungeons of death. and Persephone ate of the seeds of the pomegranate in his garden in hell
once the daughter of life ate of the seeds of the knowledge of death in death's realm
once the serpent tempted Eve with the power of imagining, simulating,
When the serpent, twined about the one world tree, tempted PsuXe to eat of the fruit of convolution and it lodged into her head and she began to imagine, to dream, for the first time, stories of life and death, in fear she fled the embryonic oneness of her slumber and Nous suddenly separated from her embrace from the oneness of their flesh, for the first time felt bare and cold and felt the separateness of his flesh and yearned for the touch of her and he chased after her luscious ripeness and both of them running round the world tree, he, dripping his seeds and she naming them
and the world tree split with them and the tree of the making of good and evil split off from the tree of the wholeness of birth and death and the tree of making leaned toward their chase and slowly began its wobble about the world axis of the wholeness of birth and death
and thus the sun's path around that tree of knowledge separated from the path of consort with the dead, leaving the burnt milky way in its memory. And the path of the sun, the path of life no longer turned round the world axis but about that tilting one, and the sun sometimes dipped too low and sometimes soared too high and forced the changing of seasons into dry summers and cold deathly winters and with him the lord of the four quarters was now ever slowly shifting houses and the world order was ever doomed to endless repetition of binge and collapse of empire.
No longer could the people travel freely along the path of the dead and the path of the living. The living people thirsted to see their dead companions face to face, and the dead thirsted for the living, and as the memory of their consort with each other faded, they created gods and monsters.
[ its not the sun's path of life vs the milky way's path of the dead, but the sun god's judgment making, making good/evil vs the tao, the path of the wholeness of birthing/dying]
[ but there are two creation stories here. One of mind's separation from soul along their dark journey lost in the caverns of man's winding brain, and the prior one of the creation of time itself from the eternal orbit of gravity. Or... once upon a time the axis of the globe of Earth did tilt, but man's wakening to sin did not cause it. Nor did man's wakening to sin cause the invitation of sin into the world at large. Three tasks: to tell the tale of the birth of time and the creative powers of the universe; to tell the tale of the birth of mankind's lonely journey to become a creator in the convoluted caverns of his brain; to decide whether these two tales are related at all. can mankind's story be an image for the story of the cosmos? Can the shapes and cycles and imperfections of the cosmos be an image for the story of mankind? Does mankind belong to this Earth, or was he breathed into it by a god totally alien to these stories?]
[but more. at some point i tell of the birth of nous/time out of the eternal orbit of Cosmos. but that's wrong. birth of nous/time is something that occurred in H. sapiens history, or in each of our own awakening to consciousness. outside of our stories, lie Kosmos, and the second law of thermodynamics always existed. evolution by a process of iteration in unique time moments, WAY off of the eternal manifold has existed since there was energy flow. Do you mean AFTER the big bang, i.e. before that, KOSMOS was a singularity, not a multiplicity of places and thus there WAS NO ENERGY FLOW and thus THERE WAS NO TIME FLOW? hmmm...
anyway we created this idea of a paradise on the smooth eternal manifold AFTER our conscious time sense awoke. THERE IS NO REAL LIFE FOR US ON THE ETERNAL SMOOTH MANIFOLD, THERE CAN BE NO HUMAN EXPERIENCE AT THERMODYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM.]
when Eve was offered the fruit of convolution and began to dream myriad beings herself, the lone creator beheld her and said, "Lo, she has become as...". No, the lone creator said no such thing. We created such stories, the first creator created only frogs and feathers and such
When PsuXe, the changing luscious fertile conceiving and hellish frightening aborting moon sparked Nous' imagination when she taught him to tell time and to sit under the moonlit night by the fire and spin tales to narrate eternal knowledge into tales of time
THE HELL SHE DID, SHE TAUGHT HIM TO HUDDLE BY THE FIRE AND KNOW FEAR.
just after the beginning of time, when Eve stole the pomegranate of ecosystem from the tree and gave it to man, he did not at all understand its nature. He feared not being able to consort with the dead. He feared the flight of PsuXe, he feared being alone.
the cavern he lived in grew large. The cavern of mind was empty with echoes. the vault of sky and mind was far away and every time man tried to apprehend those walls, they, being his very apprehension itself, swelled and grew more distant still.
When man was given the craft of creation he was so ignorant of its ways. He no longer remembered the connection of birth and death. He was ignorant of the role of chance as the source for all new ideas. He was ignorant of the craft of trial and error of natural selection on those ideas to hone them down.
man was so busy chasing with mind PsuXe's luscious ass that he lost track of the way of interlinking cycles of cause and effect of ecosystems at far from equilibrium and knew only how to spin... an orbital cycle at equilibrium or a linear narration of history (that's not equilibrium. but it ain't complex links of cause and effect either.)... along the cold black manifold of space
it was a long journey to the knowledge of the craft of creation
longing for that life before time, that life before 'before', that life of union between Nous and PsuXe, man at first decided that all creation occurred in the past, before time. He decided all new ideas, in reality, gifts of the random flux in time, were but memories of the fullness of all knowledge from his eternal embryonic existence before time. So ignorant about creation was he that he thought that all there is and that will be was held in embryo in the mind of god, a very large idea he created from his very large fear.
man did not even know about creation, the vast limitless flux of miracles and myriad interacting womb beings who nurtured and traded them
so new was this chasing mind of his in PsuXe's convoluted caverns of cerebral networks that he spun his own story of what creation was. Man created an image of creation after his own meagre single minded chasing after PsuXe's flight.
Creation went on right before his eyes but he set his eyes upon the image he created of creation and chased after it in fear of the fleshy fertile grub springing forth decaying mass of life and death that was himself.
it was too much, too fast, for eve to swallow the globe of the creator Earth, to swallow the birthing/dying creative brain which could then imagine her own birthing/dying
mankind was still way too small to handle the knowledge of himself as this mass of flesh, giving itself to the random flux alternately birthing himselves into the myriad beings and killing himselves repeatedly to hone those beings down into creation.
the newborn homunculus of tiny man born suddenly into the knowledge, into the cavern of ten thousand billion neurons, this fragile newborn body born into the knowledge that ten pounds of his own flesh can be flesh to the creation and destruction of worlds in imagination. This man thinking himself alone on all the face of this huge Earth of his wanderings, capable of this
thrust into the theatre of such a depth that he has been lost in its convolutions for hundreds of thousands of years, and the longer he journeys, the more convoluted this theatre becomes and the more convoluted the theatre the more earnestly he creates stories to combat it. He became so preoccupied with his own falling into this inner cavern that he forgot, then shunned the first creator, Earth.
forgetting the reality of this fleshy muddy birthing dying Earth that he is, being so lost in, so invested in, this hundred thousand year long drama that he has created solely out of ideas, so huge and delicate this construct of ideas has become, that the threat of the reality of birthing dying flesh has brought on a fear so huge as to create the beast satan...
the mind of man and the body of man were not meant to come together so quickly in the course of evolution!
mankind was given the ability to imagine his own creation and destruction when he was yet so young. He has been having nightmares ever since. nightmares played out in a theatre so complex and convoluted that it is easier to imagine them more real than the whole Earth which in reality contains him and created him.
[to watch a movie like "End Of Days"...] with the hugeness of forces imagined about a single human being wrapped up with the creation of sin in the world. that we feel ourselves responsible for the creation of sin in this whole six trillion trillion ton convecting globe of four billion years of geological history and evolution of the myriad species...
What happened in the brain of man, that out of fear he is compelled to create an image of a winged gargoyle bat serpent with a head out of the depths of the seas living in the center of the Earth, living under six trillion trillion tons of gyrating molten rock and bursting forth out of his slumber to burst up through the floor of a cathedral and to ravish a nubile young virgin? What fears bring up this horror? What forces within myself brings up such fear to require the destruction of a whole world?
need to tell it thus: all occurrences of mention of "man" must be changed to "myself". can only tell this story from self knowledge. surely i contain those same primeval colossal fears which can create such a satan monster to destroy the world? Surely, my imagination is so rich that thirty seven years full of moments of this imagination feels as rich as the creation of a whole world? And I am slowly destroying it through my own frailty? does that not contain a nightmare? Can any story or myth be able to build up within me the horror and suspense of thirty seven long years full of moment after moment of enticement and failure to create? The horror of my death which i can well imagine as the death of all my ability to experience and remember all I have experienced and imagined. my death will destroy worlds! for me, it will destroy all the people i love and this whole earth that i love. for all i know, when i die, it all goes! And each moment of failure is killing me. or, each moment that i fail to be here now and experience those around me,
and added to all this is the power of mankind in his real ecosystem. Homo sapiens, the aggressive team player, running from so HUGE a fear is devouring his first creator Earth! We are now capable of fucking with her climate, we are now capable of blasting her surface into another mass extinction. if we can do this, and learn to last ourselves a few more centuries we will surely build up the machines to reproduce her or destroy her totally. We certainly did in reality become as God, the first creator. This ecosystem of Earth has reproduced herself, birthed six billion little gods in her belly. and how will it play out? Why do we even have so much trouble finding our real mother? How long will it take? will we learn wisdom from her in time? will we be as seed to her and spread her life to other planets before we destroy our only body?
just as well man should fear armageddon and take responsibility for it! We are capable. Yes, with our birth, not that sin came into the world, but that a race of young gods came into the world
well first creator Earth always had capability within herself to get out of kilter and destroy the whole ecosystem, no? Do we know enough about her to say that she is wise enough to sustain harmony, a kind of sloppy gaia argument, and that we are not wise enough to create properly? is the Birth of Homo sapiens any more dangerous and earth shattering as any other event on the face of Earth has been?
we don't know yet
but we can imagine it possible...
this needs a form and boundaries. How much of the story to tell.
Once upon a time, mankind were many hairy pawns in Earth's huge theatre of creation. Each ape a pawn, a question, a trial, many errors, in Nature's give and take to discover what it took to act the next scene. Men and woman were given each their scripts to play out, unquestioning, how could they question or change the scripts? No way to see the whole world, no way to imagine all the characters at once. The only character imaginable to animals was itself.
Then the pace of play picked up.
The scripts weren't always handed out
improvisation was necessary, but how?
Slowly an improvisatory organ evolved in the skull of mankind
and how it pained the woman to give birth to its great girth
mankind learned to write the script as he went along
They didn't know what the hell they were doing, these little apes
with swolen heads, but they sensed the caverns growing up there
up there became a theatre in itself
The vault of the stage no longer the clear blue sky and cold black night, but a nebulous cavern inside with no boundaries?
and for a while
mankind got lost in it, he was no longer in the original play of forest and stream and savannah,
no longer learned his lines in the original play.
the other players were very distraught, men and woman no longer responded correctly
in fact this new ape began tearing the original world theatre down in their blind sleep walking as they dreamed in their own private theatres
God dam that each had such a huge theatre in his own head, he could very well Goddamit, write a whole play and play all the parts in an hour,
in an hour, a play that took the one world theatre millennia to run.
The other myriad beings were totally bewildered, couldn't keep up.
After awhile these naked apes saw that they were pretty hot stuff, not understanding why, but it was obvious to see, they knew that their numbers were on the rise, their stench called to high heavens... either that or their atrocious farming practices denuding the hillsides, caused the gods to rain down floods down the mountains submerging their port settlements in slime
after awhile they could predict how the gods moved the heavens
after a while they could feel their own existences achingly alone...
and so, lacking hubris, they lost respect for the original imaginer of plays. The landscape itself around them, the eons it took to do the imagining, way back into geological time. The land meant nothing to these new naked silly people. They at least felt a closer affinity to the vault at night, it was easier to imagine it limitless and frightening as their own head vaults. The mind vault was certainly NOT a sunny Blue meadow.
Each man and woman's mind theatre being selfcontained, they thirsted for real company in that cavernous hall. A lover. A God. But none were able to enter. It dawned on the folk of these early cities that they used to have communion in a larger play, with each other, with the animals even, with the creative powers of Earth. It dawned on these folk that they were expelled from communion and had to find a way within
God! did they dig inwards, fasting in deserts alone for a decade, watching their own breath one after another till time itself expired, spinning elaborate mathematical constructs floating in the middle of ones own skull vault.
What an awful mess. It was clear that men or at least a company of them could create what took their first mother eons to come up with. Even to create things that were never before seen on the face of the earth. Atom bombs, liquid crystal displays, lasers, ring dings...
And their songs... Never had there been heard on the face of the Earth songs so sinuously long and achingly beautiful, or horrifying... Songs more complex then the routes the planets took amongst the fixed posts of the heavens.
And the more they searched, the more alone they felt. No, their cousins, the chimpanzee and gorilla really couldn't stitch keen thought together in those lengthy sentences our children learn with ease. They have even taken to searching the seas for companions. Did the whales really sing? They had hunted whales since their time began, always seafarers, and yet rarely suspected whales of yarn spinning play. yet lately it is seeming possible to them, perhaps before it's too late and not to hunt the last one.
But so many millennia of pride as the brand new gods on the face of this earth. Would mankind be willing to accept an equal to share a finite planet.?
Friday, April 13, 2007
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
yhvh wants us to grow into creative individuals
how to imagine the character of yhvh and his relationship with us? not supposed to imagine him before b'reishit, but why not? imagine him forward, extrapolate backwards. he falls in love with noakh, abram, yaakov. out of this love he renews marriage with their people. is he attracted to them or is it an abstract exercise to use them as an example to everyone else to show how he can toy with man and bestow good, or withhold it. come on bar, imagine him. Elohim or yhvh?
the tale begins in creation, no motivation. creates and pronouces good. he likes good. let us create light, fish, animals, birds, adam in our own image. why? he doesnt say. just bids them fruitful. sets ha'adam in gan eden. mysterious warning about world trees, why? doesn't say. inscrutible, just does. punishes adam v'khava. does he give reasons? 'cause they disowbeyed. because you didn't listen.
what's their relationship? what does he say to them? he says eat, don't eat of the tree of knowlege of good and bad, (lest they become as one of us) but later he gives 'am yisroel tora so that they can know good and bad. perhaps he didn't want them NOT to eat of the tree, but wanted to see just HOW bad they wanted that knowlege.. aha! it was a test they PASSED, not FAILED! yhvh wanted to know if they would think beyond him! think for themselves, desire more life than given. hmm.... this gets interesting now. also in the test: immortality but as a fairy, or mortality but a real moral life? does he say IF you eat of the tree you will die, or does he say DON'T eat of the tree, you will die. gotta look carefully.
of course whatever DID happen, humans would interpret it as a bad outcome, even though yhvh thought it was admirable. kids always want to stay in the nest, interpret it as cruel when the parents dump them out. hmmm...
what else is there to the relationship?
says it's not good for adam to be alone, brings him animals! what a dumb god! he doesn't know at first what adam needs. or is it another test for adam? to see what adam wants. hmm... they are exploring each other. adam of course follows like a puppy. NOT khava! she takes charge. she sees that the fruit of knowlege is good for understanding and takes it, and gives it to her man.
what else? then he curses adam, khava, the snake, the soil. and sends them into the world. are those really curses?
they have kids.
does yhvh ASK for offerings? no, they spontaneously offer them to yhvh.
but yhvh does cause more drama by choosing and rejecting the sons. another test? yes he states to cain that it is a test: sin crouches at your door, but you can withstand it. this test we fail at. no? more curses.
b'reishit is heavy in this sibling rivalry thing. is there something deeper going on? duh.... the siblings are not just brothers, sisters, they are peoples. different peoples striving against each other. why does yhvh set THAT up? the test is can we learn to speciate like the rest of life?
does yhvh specifically create species? hell yeah! b'reishit is very emphatic about the plants and animals bearing seed according to their kind. and all through tora distinctions are important, so definitely. at bavel, definitely yhvh creates differing cultures. he sets up the test. he says i don't want you to all be clones, i don't want the borg. he differentiates between cain and hevel because he doesn't want them to be identical. the first thing we learn about them is that they are farmer and pastoralist. already at each other's thoats.
so it's all about tests, yhvh wants to see creativity diversity, can we handle it. wants to see if we desire mortality and drama and conflict and resolution. pits brothers against each other because man is NOT created equal, THAT'S the way it is. now, can we deal with that? sin crouches at our door will we tackle or succumb? our test. up to us. we are the creator now. 6 days yhvh created, now it's our turn.
So what's with the flood? b'nei adam breeds like animals, like it always does. individuality receeds (notice before the flood the names fade, just as in mizraim, the names fade and yisroel turns into a seething breeding mass). and the sex with b'nei elohim. and something else. all flesh is corrupted in yhvh's eyes. but the text is not clear on exactly what that is. no test is given here. humanity just kind of anonymously decays. what went wrong?
maybe humanity failed to live up to the test of morality and creativity? failed to differentiate itself into individuals, became a mass of anonymous flesh. yhvh above all desires individuals and creativity.
another idea is that yhvh becomes horrified by lustingbirthingdyingeating flesh he has created. odd. didn't he know? if you want to say he set up particular tests for his critter than he must know how it is... is it a story about an all knowing god, or a story about OUR perception of things. what do we percieve that becomes horrified by this fleshy life?
whatever it is now yhvh becomes horrified that something is wrong and feels he must wipe it out. however... he finds PLEASURE... in Noakh. Noakh STOOD OUT in his generation. This is what yhvh desires, men and women that can stand out. yhvh is he is very particular about ... he picks certain men. women take command of things, but yhvh falls in love with the men. personifies Israel as a woman. twisty! not only that, but certain men have a calming effect on his savageness. so somehow Noakh calms yhvh and changes his mind about destroying all flesh. it's not that yhvh decides to save critters and commands Noakh to do it. No, Noakh turns his heart to do otherwise. as does Abraham at Sodom. and at Egypt? no, that one is twisted. but at sinai, he wants to wipe out Israel and start from scratch again with Moshe, Moshe talks him out of it. a theme here... but finally no one comes to avert his anger, and he sends Israel into exile.
more at the tower of babel. what was the crime? to reach heaven, to make a name for themselves, to become as god... that's the whole trip the humans want to become as god, and god keeps putting hurdles in their way. he's saying at bavel: you don't become god by ALL working together, got to speciate, you've got find your separate ways. so he scatters them.
then he comes down and focuses on abraham, you guys will become a blessing to all peoples, a people of priests. You be an example of one of the separate ways to become holy.
once we get to Abraham god leaves everyone else alone? that's a puzzler. 'course the story is told from only one perspective... but the nevi'im say no, god keeps working through other peoples on Israels's behalf, with that persian guy to let the jews back to israel, or with the babylonians to teach them a lesson. nevertheless, we preserve a tale of johah, that god does speak to other people's on their behalf.
so what happens now? waiting for the age when all nations come together? or all nations learn to live their blessing of uniqueness creatively with each other?
the tale begins in creation, no motivation. creates and pronouces good. he likes good. let us create light, fish, animals, birds, adam in our own image. why? he doesnt say. just bids them fruitful. sets ha'adam in gan eden. mysterious warning about world trees, why? doesn't say. inscrutible, just does. punishes adam v'khava. does he give reasons? 'cause they disowbeyed. because you didn't listen.
what's their relationship? what does he say to them? he says eat, don't eat of the tree of knowlege of good and bad, (lest they become as one of us) but later he gives 'am yisroel tora so that they can know good and bad. perhaps he didn't want them NOT to eat of the tree, but wanted to see just HOW bad they wanted that knowlege.. aha! it was a test they PASSED, not FAILED! yhvh wanted to know if they would think beyond him! think for themselves, desire more life than given. hmm.... this gets interesting now. also in the test: immortality but as a fairy, or mortality but a real moral life? does he say IF you eat of the tree you will die, or does he say DON'T eat of the tree, you will die. gotta look carefully.
of course whatever DID happen, humans would interpret it as a bad outcome, even though yhvh thought it was admirable. kids always want to stay in the nest, interpret it as cruel when the parents dump them out. hmmm...
what else is there to the relationship?
says it's not good for adam to be alone, brings him animals! what a dumb god! he doesn't know at first what adam needs. or is it another test for adam? to see what adam wants. hmm... they are exploring each other. adam of course follows like a puppy. NOT khava! she takes charge. she sees that the fruit of knowlege is good for understanding and takes it, and gives it to her man.
what else? then he curses adam, khava, the snake, the soil. and sends them into the world. are those really curses?
they have kids.
does yhvh ASK for offerings? no, they spontaneously offer them to yhvh.
but yhvh does cause more drama by choosing and rejecting the sons. another test? yes he states to cain that it is a test: sin crouches at your door, but you can withstand it. this test we fail at. no? more curses.
b'reishit is heavy in this sibling rivalry thing. is there something deeper going on? duh.... the siblings are not just brothers, sisters, they are peoples. different peoples striving against each other. why does yhvh set THAT up? the test is can we learn to speciate like the rest of life?
does yhvh specifically create species? hell yeah! b'reishit is very emphatic about the plants and animals bearing seed according to their kind. and all through tora distinctions are important, so definitely. at bavel, definitely yhvh creates differing cultures. he sets up the test. he says i don't want you to all be clones, i don't want the borg. he differentiates between cain and hevel because he doesn't want them to be identical. the first thing we learn about them is that they are farmer and pastoralist. already at each other's thoats.
so it's all about tests, yhvh wants to see creativity diversity, can we handle it. wants to see if we desire mortality and drama and conflict and resolution. pits brothers against each other because man is NOT created equal, THAT'S the way it is. now, can we deal with that? sin crouches at our door will we tackle or succumb? our test. up to us. we are the creator now. 6 days yhvh created, now it's our turn.
So what's with the flood? b'nei adam breeds like animals, like it always does. individuality receeds (notice before the flood the names fade, just as in mizraim, the names fade and yisroel turns into a seething breeding mass). and the sex with b'nei elohim. and something else. all flesh is corrupted in yhvh's eyes. but the text is not clear on exactly what that is. no test is given here. humanity just kind of anonymously decays. what went wrong?
maybe humanity failed to live up to the test of morality and creativity? failed to differentiate itself into individuals, became a mass of anonymous flesh. yhvh above all desires individuals and creativity.
another idea is that yhvh becomes horrified by lustingbirthingdyingeating flesh he has created. odd. didn't he know? if you want to say he set up particular tests for his critter than he must know how it is... is it a story about an all knowing god, or a story about OUR perception of things. what do we percieve that becomes horrified by this fleshy life?
whatever it is now yhvh becomes horrified that something is wrong and feels he must wipe it out. however... he finds PLEASURE... in Noakh. Noakh STOOD OUT in his generation. This is what yhvh desires, men and women that can stand out. yhvh is he is very particular about ... he picks certain men. women take command of things, but yhvh falls in love with the men. personifies Israel as a woman. twisty! not only that, but certain men have a calming effect on his savageness. so somehow Noakh calms yhvh and changes his mind about destroying all flesh. it's not that yhvh decides to save critters and commands Noakh to do it. No, Noakh turns his heart to do otherwise. as does Abraham at Sodom. and at Egypt? no, that one is twisted. but at sinai, he wants to wipe out Israel and start from scratch again with Moshe, Moshe talks him out of it. a theme here... but finally no one comes to avert his anger, and he sends Israel into exile.
more at the tower of babel. what was the crime? to reach heaven, to make a name for themselves, to become as god... that's the whole trip the humans want to become as god, and god keeps putting hurdles in their way. he's saying at bavel: you don't become god by ALL working together, got to speciate, you've got find your separate ways. so he scatters them.
then he comes down and focuses on abraham, you guys will become a blessing to all peoples, a people of priests. You be an example of one of the separate ways to become holy.
once we get to Abraham god leaves everyone else alone? that's a puzzler. 'course the story is told from only one perspective... but the nevi'im say no, god keeps working through other peoples on Israels's behalf, with that persian guy to let the jews back to israel, or with the babylonians to teach them a lesson. nevertheless, we preserve a tale of johah, that god does speak to other people's on their behalf.
so what happens now? waiting for the age when all nations come together? or all nations learn to live their blessing of uniqueness creatively with each other?
commentary on b'reishit ch 1-2:3
(the hebrew is sometimes in the parenthesis, sometimes the possible english translations are)
tora
b'reishit
At the begining of elohim's creating (barah), when the sky and earth were a mishmash, darkness was over the face of t'hom (the depths? tiamat the goddess of the depths?), and ruakh elohim (the breath, spirit of?) hovered (like an eagle flapping her wings) on the face of the waters.
Elohim said let there be light. and there was. light was from elohim. and it permeated the darkness.
Elohim seperated this light from darkness. and he called them day and night. and indeed there was a first evening and a morning. did god then create time?
And elohim made (ya'as) a space in the midst of the waters. and it seperated the waters above and the waters below, and he called it skies (shamayim shemesh is the sun, mayim the waters, is the sky the sun waters? or the sun sea it's dual, sun's place between the seas?). a second day
And elohim said let the waters gather in one place, and dry land appeared. who did this gathering? he named the dry space land, earth (eretz) and the waters (mayim) seas (yamim)
And elohim said t'dashe ha'aretz deshe, let the earth sprout forth sprouts which reproduce them selves. and the earth herself brought forth these plants and trees. the earth and the plants are self generating. the water and land was already there... the only element from elohim himself was light. and the only shaping was of the day and night and the waters from the waters to make the skies.
And elohim made (ya'as) the two lights in the sky and the stars. it's clear that light comes from the sun, but also in the shade of the greater light there is still the original light from the beginning.... And elohim set them into the sky. The sun, the moon and the constellations are stripped of their creative powers. no competition in this story with elohim except t'hom and the waters and generative earth were also there.
And elohim said yishretzu h'mayim sheretz let the waters swarm forth a swarm of living beings and the birds flying in the sky. And elohim Created (barah), tana'im the serpents, and all that crept swam and flew after their kinds. Note that he created KINDS, not an amorphous mass of life, but distinct kinds. and elohim blessed them to be fruitful, and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and the earth. the plants received their generative powers and blessings from the earth herself, but the animals were elohim's work, and needed his special blessing to produce more. Elohim is partial to ANIMALS hmmm...
And here is another problem. god creates the light and pronounces it good. he creates the sky and forgets to pronounce it good. he creates seas and land and pronounces them good, he calls the earth to generate plant life and pronounces it good. he creates the lights in the skies and pronounces them good. he creates the living beings, he blesses them, but forgets to pronounce them good? or does the blessing cover it? This is not a smoothly strictly rhyming poem. ah... a possibility, he's not 100% happy with animals, cause they have to KILL and eat each other to live. he's very ambivelent about this flesh he created. maybe also that they have SEX. actually, not. these are swarming creeping things and birds though. he does pronounce land animals good, but forgets to BLESS them. it's a mess.
And elohim said totze ha'aretz nefesh chaya let the earth bring forth living beings after their kind (and the text misses a chance at alliteration that was used for the plantlife, and the sea life!). And elohim made (ya'as) khayat aretz, wild animals and elohim does remember to pronouce them good, but this time FORGETS TO BLESS THEM and bid them be fruitful and fill the earth!!! this is a glearing lacuna! can we say that it is up to us to bless animals? but elohim blessed the birds and the weat...
And elohim said let us make (ya'as) humanity (adam) in our image (tzelem). and Elohim created (barah) humnity in his image. male and female he created them Male and female is the image of Elohim? male and female is the image of creation?. but why aren't the animals created male and female, as surely they are? and Elohim blessed them and said be fruitful and increase and fill the earth and subdue and dominate it. and Elohim said "i give you all the vegetation as food" and to all living beings i give vegetation as food. and Elohim said it was very good.
Does elohim mean to say that at this point animals DON'T eat each other? very odd.
and the skies and the earth were finished. and in the seventh day Elohim finished his work, he ceased from working on that day. and he blessed the seventh day and made it holy (kodesh) because he ceased in it from doing all his work. and here in the last stanza of creation god doesn't even create the holy day, but the day happens naturally and god makes it holy by NOT creating.
The text is beatiful, suggestive, and corrupt. i say it is corrupt because it suggests a grandly rhyming set of parallel stanzas, but they are not COMPLETELY parallel in seemingly odd ways. The corruptions where preserved! Why? the corruptions were preserved to jar us? to beg us to jump in and complete them? to discuss and argue why they are there? a fascinating text, no?
tora
b'reishit
At the begining of elohim's creating (barah), when the sky and earth were a mishmash, darkness was over the face of t'hom (the depths? tiamat the goddess of the depths?), and ruakh elohim (the breath, spirit of?) hovered (like an eagle flapping her wings) on the face of the waters.
Elohim said let there be light. and there was. light was from elohim. and it permeated the darkness.
Elohim seperated this light from darkness. and he called them day and night. and indeed there was a first evening and a morning. did god then create time?
And elohim made (ya'as) a space in the midst of the waters. and it seperated the waters above and the waters below, and he called it skies (shamayim shemesh is the sun, mayim the waters, is the sky the sun waters? or the sun sea it's dual, sun's place between the seas?). a second day
And elohim said let the waters gather in one place, and dry land appeared. who did this gathering? he named the dry space land, earth (eretz) and the waters (mayim) seas (yamim)
And elohim said t'dashe ha'aretz deshe, let the earth sprout forth sprouts which reproduce them selves. and the earth herself brought forth these plants and trees. the earth and the plants are self generating. the water and land was already there... the only element from elohim himself was light. and the only shaping was of the day and night and the waters from the waters to make the skies.
And elohim made (ya'as) the two lights in the sky and the stars. it's clear that light comes from the sun, but also in the shade of the greater light there is still the original light from the beginning.... And elohim set them into the sky. The sun, the moon and the constellations are stripped of their creative powers. no competition in this story with elohim except t'hom and the waters and generative earth were also there.
And elohim said yishretzu h'mayim sheretz let the waters swarm forth a swarm of living beings and the birds flying in the sky. And elohim Created (barah), tana'im the serpents, and all that crept swam and flew after their kinds. Note that he created KINDS, not an amorphous mass of life, but distinct kinds. and elohim blessed them to be fruitful, and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and the earth. the plants received their generative powers and blessings from the earth herself, but the animals were elohim's work, and needed his special blessing to produce more. Elohim is partial to ANIMALS hmmm...
And here is another problem. god creates the light and pronounces it good. he creates the sky and forgets to pronounce it good. he creates seas and land and pronounces them good, he calls the earth to generate plant life and pronounces it good. he creates the lights in the skies and pronounces them good. he creates the living beings, he blesses them, but forgets to pronounce them good? or does the blessing cover it? This is not a smoothly strictly rhyming poem. ah... a possibility, he's not 100% happy with animals, cause they have to KILL and eat each other to live. he's very ambivelent about this flesh he created. maybe also that they have SEX. actually, not. these are swarming creeping things and birds though. he does pronounce land animals good, but forgets to BLESS them. it's a mess.
And elohim said totze ha'aretz nefesh chaya let the earth bring forth living beings after their kind (and the text misses a chance at alliteration that was used for the plantlife, and the sea life!). And elohim made (ya'as) khayat aretz, wild animals and elohim does remember to pronouce them good, but this time FORGETS TO BLESS THEM and bid them be fruitful and fill the earth!!! this is a glearing lacuna! can we say that it is up to us to bless animals? but elohim blessed the birds and the weat...
And elohim said let us make (ya'as) humanity (adam) in our image (tzelem). and Elohim created (barah) humnity in his image. male and female he created them Male and female is the image of Elohim? male and female is the image of creation?. but why aren't the animals created male and female, as surely they are? and Elohim blessed them and said be fruitful and increase and fill the earth and subdue and dominate it. and Elohim said "i give you all the vegetation as food" and to all living beings i give vegetation as food. and Elohim said it was very good.
Does elohim mean to say that at this point animals DON'T eat each other? very odd.
and the skies and the earth were finished. and in the seventh day Elohim finished his work, he ceased from working on that day. and he blessed the seventh day and made it holy (kodesh) because he ceased in it from doing all his work. and here in the last stanza of creation god doesn't even create the holy day, but the day happens naturally and god makes it holy by NOT creating.
The text is beatiful, suggestive, and corrupt. i say it is corrupt because it suggests a grandly rhyming set of parallel stanzas, but they are not COMPLETELY parallel in seemingly odd ways. The corruptions where preserved! Why? the corruptions were preserved to jar us? to beg us to jump in and complete them? to discuss and argue why they are there? a fascinating text, no?
Friday, March 23, 2007
my childhood journey into an Earth centered Cosmological mythology
So N. says that her communist Bulgarian upbringing told her that we are just accidents of evolution. but in meditation, in sitting under the stars at night she FELT this was not so...
she asks why the traditional 400 year old science paradigm told her this. why did she grow up feeling disconnected from the natural world that science described.
so i say it's not science or ....
i DID grow up connected to the natural world. my dad took me to the museum of natural history, he took me to the park, he took us out to the country the lake the woods on weekends, wher he showed me how to look under every log and stone for the little creatures growing there, he showed me the plants and the trees.. we lived in the trailer on weekends, we always had cats giving birth to kittens, i always had jars of guppies and snails and algae birthing and dying and growin, i was always under the bushes digging up plants and rocks and bugs, i was always drawing coral reefs learning about fossils i always knew that i was molecules, that i was in ecosystems, that i had a long history going back to abraham and back further to a dual inheritence of some god story and some story back through stone age people back through apes back all the way long history back to trilobytes and eurypterids back to elegant magnificent single celled critters who's delicate amazing glass models i saw at the museum that i could relate to the critters i watched staring into pond water with my friend mossimo, back to chemistry itself, i played with my chemistry set, i felt sodium thiosulfate get cold when added to water, i felt ferric ferric ammonium sulfate get warm when added to water, i watched sulfer go through its mysterious phase transitions as it was heated. i looked at stars through my telescope and learned their distances and ages and ...
this was before i ever read Stuart kauffman and brian swimm.
so how old is this tradition? at one point at stony brook i wanted to track it down. i never did. i never asked my dad where he got it.
is it a product of my autistic mind? that whenever the complex tangled human shit got to intense i would go immerse myself in finite
simple details of the natural world?
so where did i get that connection and why did N. not get it? so i claim i got it from science, from a tradition... not science, some hodge podge of european naturalists, american mountain men, american native peoples.
when i was in middle school i read McIlvain's 1001 american fungi. here was an american man riding around the country on his horse at the turn of the century (earlier?), setting up camp wherever he found a new patch of mushrooms and proceeding to dispell old european ideas about their edibility/danger and get to know them on their own. he lived off the land, he practiced science: well what WILL this mushroom do to me, let me try a tiny morsel, no that's not bad, let me try a bigger one... he communicated with the academic botanists getting the names straight, getting the classifications straight.
i partook in this with him. i tried my own mushrooms, i looked them up in his book, and keyed them out. this connected me to the land, to the mysterious mushrooms, to the tradition of naturalists, to science.
ditto i identified with Lutz, and his experiences with the insects around him in his field guide to insects. that grown men would just sit on the ground and watch the details of lives of insects not to learn how best to poison them to grow better crops (though of course many are motivated by that or more to the point, take advantage of governments that are motivated by that to fund their own scientific fascination) but merely because they were fascinating little lives in their own right.
i got to know around 150 different insects in my childhood, that i still carry the experiences of today.
i had sometimes up to 4 fishtanks in my room chock full of mini ecosystems, every conceivible group of critters in the water, i read Buchbaum's "animals without backbones", a survey of all those disparate critters. i kept frogs with me in the room as companions, i used to pet my banjo catfish, i used to play tug of war with the crayfish down the pond.
where was the science? my dad and i would repair the family car, troubleshooting, knowing which fractions of an inch corresponded to which number of millimeters to find the right socket wrench. math was something you got you hands dirty on.
i had a telescope, i went to the planetarium, i would take home little science toys, like magnets... when i was REALLY young i had a record that i would listen to explaining how molecules worked, that the properties of heat and the sound in seashells and steam was the work of molecules in the air water... rushing around... i listened to these along with my tom and jerry records.
was i told that we were evolutionary accidents?
i remember in highschool thinking that the argument about probabilities was stupid, that at each stage the complexity of the stage before it tightens the probabilities.
i think that having heard the evolutionary story so much from my earliest memories that i took it for GRANTED? maybe i grew up in a more optimistic time than N. did.
i think that i autistically, no but i was in good company on this, i found so much comfort in NONHUMAN nature that whether the grand story of evolving life came up with humans or not wasn't a BIG issue, the other critters were just as entitled to it.
did i feel lost in a vast cosmos? at what age are we talking? i think she is talking about later teens! hell, by then i had read tons of science fiction had created my own vast mythologies about life and the universe. hell, remember planetology?
so, steeped in tora, science fiction, evolution, cosmology, native american mythology... i had no trouble finding mythic stuctures to place me in this cosmos. in 7th grade while contemplating the essentially metabolic nature of grasshopper lives, i cooked up this idea of planetology: that molecules had the desire to enter into more complex relationships, wider ranges of mixing... i saw the whole evolution of life on Earth and up to man with his earth mixing technologies and one day travel to other planets to spread life, as a property of the very particles of the universe, physics. my ideas, i later found out were not in line with modern physics, yet they carried me. and to this day, following those ideas of why do molecular systems, planetary systems lead to more complex order, i learned about far from equilibrium dissapative systems, that yes order does come from the laws of physics and mathematics.
don't forget all the math and computer science and cellular automata i studied. i was doing math puzzles forever. already even without a universe, mathematics itself, geometry itself, gives order for free. i knew this.
so there you had it. by seventh grade i had created my own mythology which i believed joined me to history, Earth, science, Cosmology... i never had trouble feeling connected with the universe. science never got a chance to alienate me.
she asks why the traditional 400 year old science paradigm told her this. why did she grow up feeling disconnected from the natural world that science described.
so i say it's not science or ....
i DID grow up connected to the natural world. my dad took me to the museum of natural history, he took me to the park, he took us out to the country the lake the woods on weekends, wher he showed me how to look under every log and stone for the little creatures growing there, he showed me the plants and the trees.. we lived in the trailer on weekends, we always had cats giving birth to kittens, i always had jars of guppies and snails and algae birthing and dying and growin, i was always under the bushes digging up plants and rocks and bugs, i was always drawing coral reefs learning about fossils i always knew that i was molecules, that i was in ecosystems, that i had a long history going back to abraham and back further to a dual inheritence of some god story and some story back through stone age people back through apes back all the way long history back to trilobytes and eurypterids back to elegant magnificent single celled critters who's delicate amazing glass models i saw at the museum that i could relate to the critters i watched staring into pond water with my friend mossimo, back to chemistry itself, i played with my chemistry set, i felt sodium thiosulfate get cold when added to water, i felt ferric ferric ammonium sulfate get warm when added to water, i watched sulfer go through its mysterious phase transitions as it was heated. i looked at stars through my telescope and learned their distances and ages and ...
this was before i ever read Stuart kauffman and brian swimm.
so how old is this tradition? at one point at stony brook i wanted to track it down. i never did. i never asked my dad where he got it.
is it a product of my autistic mind? that whenever the complex tangled human shit got to intense i would go immerse myself in finite
simple details of the natural world?
so where did i get that connection and why did N. not get it? so i claim i got it from science, from a tradition... not science, some hodge podge of european naturalists, american mountain men, american native peoples.
when i was in middle school i read McIlvain's 1001 american fungi. here was an american man riding around the country on his horse at the turn of the century (earlier?), setting up camp wherever he found a new patch of mushrooms and proceeding to dispell old european ideas about their edibility/danger and get to know them on their own. he lived off the land, he practiced science: well what WILL this mushroom do to me, let me try a tiny morsel, no that's not bad, let me try a bigger one... he communicated with the academic botanists getting the names straight, getting the classifications straight.
i partook in this with him. i tried my own mushrooms, i looked them up in his book, and keyed them out. this connected me to the land, to the mysterious mushrooms, to the tradition of naturalists, to science.
ditto i identified with Lutz, and his experiences with the insects around him in his field guide to insects. that grown men would just sit on the ground and watch the details of lives of insects not to learn how best to poison them to grow better crops (though of course many are motivated by that or more to the point, take advantage of governments that are motivated by that to fund their own scientific fascination) but merely because they were fascinating little lives in their own right.
i got to know around 150 different insects in my childhood, that i still carry the experiences of today.
i had sometimes up to 4 fishtanks in my room chock full of mini ecosystems, every conceivible group of critters in the water, i read Buchbaum's "animals without backbones", a survey of all those disparate critters. i kept frogs with me in the room as companions, i used to pet my banjo catfish, i used to play tug of war with the crayfish down the pond.
where was the science? my dad and i would repair the family car, troubleshooting, knowing which fractions of an inch corresponded to which number of millimeters to find the right socket wrench. math was something you got you hands dirty on.
i had a telescope, i went to the planetarium, i would take home little science toys, like magnets... when i was REALLY young i had a record that i would listen to explaining how molecules worked, that the properties of heat and the sound in seashells and steam was the work of molecules in the air water... rushing around... i listened to these along with my tom and jerry records.
was i told that we were evolutionary accidents?
i remember in highschool thinking that the argument about probabilities was stupid, that at each stage the complexity of the stage before it tightens the probabilities.
i think that having heard the evolutionary story so much from my earliest memories that i took it for GRANTED? maybe i grew up in a more optimistic time than N. did.
i think that i autistically, no but i was in good company on this, i found so much comfort in NONHUMAN nature that whether the grand story of evolving life came up with humans or not wasn't a BIG issue, the other critters were just as entitled to it.
did i feel lost in a vast cosmos? at what age are we talking? i think she is talking about later teens! hell, by then i had read tons of science fiction had created my own vast mythologies about life and the universe. hell, remember planetology?
so, steeped in tora, science fiction, evolution, cosmology, native american mythology... i had no trouble finding mythic stuctures to place me in this cosmos. in 7th grade while contemplating the essentially metabolic nature of grasshopper lives, i cooked up this idea of planetology: that molecules had the desire to enter into more complex relationships, wider ranges of mixing... i saw the whole evolution of life on Earth and up to man with his earth mixing technologies and one day travel to other planets to spread life, as a property of the very particles of the universe, physics. my ideas, i later found out were not in line with modern physics, yet they carried me. and to this day, following those ideas of why do molecular systems, planetary systems lead to more complex order, i learned about far from equilibrium dissapative systems, that yes order does come from the laws of physics and mathematics.
don't forget all the math and computer science and cellular automata i studied. i was doing math puzzles forever. already even without a universe, mathematics itself, geometry itself, gives order for free. i knew this.
so there you had it. by seventh grade i had created my own mythology which i believed joined me to history, Earth, science, Cosmology... i never had trouble feeling connected with the universe. science never got a chance to alienate me.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
foundation to the human journey
what is it to be human? IS there an answer to this question? there has been a birthing crowd of humans going back generation by generation back to the first inklings of redox reactions on sunny muds or boiling seavents. can we say at what POINT in history they were human? no. can we tell how much longer we will be human? no. is an idiot savant human? is an infant human? is an old woman suffering from alzheimer's; memory unhinged, human? is a baby born without a brain human? are siamese twins joined at the hip one or two humans? can we tell when someone is a male or a female? is a zygote human? is an embryo human? can we know each other at all?
but oddly with this mosaic of genes in a mosaic of humans on Earth TODAY there does seem to be a statistical norm, most males are male most females are female, most children surviving infancy are not joined to the hip and have their organs, their sanity intact, and spend most of their lives in human society, approximating some norm of humanity.
is to be a human a statistical concept?
why are there only ONE species of human alive today? how much of our humanity do we share with chimps, dogs, dolphins, elephants, all of life?
is the human mental experience outrageously qulitatively different than that of chimps dogs dolphins elephants...?
(i can't even ask these questions the WAY i am asking them without being in the tradition of science)
so what's the statistical norm of humanity today?
living eukaryote metazoan vertebrate mammal primate ape human each of these imparts an onion layer of quality to the human experience. or... is our basic oxidation reduction fatty chemistry at our core or is it our experience of being lost in this tangled labyrinth of 20billion neurons at our core?
we are ephemeral dances played on the congealing and expiring chemistries of Earth breath. How many molecules does it take to dance one of us living creatures? even the simplest among us, a bacteria takes about 100billion molecules to dance it in half a dozen levels of hierarchy in a couple thousand different reactions. so we are VERY far from the basic properties of physical law; quantum behavior, wave particle duality, elactromagnetic forces. we already start out as abstracted from the physics that is our ground. so we are not objects, we are dynamical mathematical dances being played on... we are ephemeral, taking part in a long journey of evolution of the forms of this dance. genetically even we are not individuals. yet we cohere. it is an odd mix. science does not yet have a good handle on how this maelstrom of chemical cycles coheres. There is alot of math involved.
Life is danced on 100s of billions or more dancing molecules, and life has been dancing LONG. 3.6billion years, almost as long as this Earth has been cool enough to have us. the dance steps take place a billion times a second. a billion billion dance steps danced by a million billion billion dancers. Organized. with physical law way way down below. and mathematics. that's the stage we were born into. there may be more stages...
we are momentary coming together places of breath in the grand cycles of Earth breathing. what one critter exhales another inhales, what one critter puts together into it's body another will take apart. therefore life eats life to live.
we are creative, each of us can be the place where new form is invented, the beginnings of a clan of new creatures that can spread accross the Earth and change it. On the flip side we are also vulnerable to horrific physiological failure, not even making it past being a zygote. basically we are the experimental thougths of this evolving journey of life on Earth.
our coherence is vulnerable.
we belong to LOOOONG family lines. lineages of grandmother after grandmother after grandmother.... a BILLION generations long. these populations weave in and out of that long history spliting, sometimes joining, The space of forms we can explore is is unimaginable. our exponential growth allows us to explore this space very thoroughly, reaching all sorts of odd corners of it. But much more forms are possible than can fit on this finite Earth, so 99.99% of our possible selves become EXTINCT along the way.
hence what exists at any particular moment are bands of organisms isolated by long histories of extinctions between them. the members of each band related to each other, the bands different from each other, seperated by extinction. Coming along for the ride with us are more than 2million different species of life on this planet today. so ignorant are we that we don't even know if it's 2million or 200million. the incredible range of the ways to be alive, most of us are ignorant of. We can relate to dogs, parrots, turtles, Cichlids(fish that take care of their kids in families) as pets. these are all vertebrates. vertebrates are just ONE of over a 100 basic different clans of living creatures. the creativity is immense.
are species coherent? this is currently a mystery, the verdict is out. it appears that many are somewhat coherent, each remaining stable for only a few million years out of the hundreds of millions of years of play, then they transform, split into many or disappear.
our branch of living creatures (the chordates) appearing more than 100million generations ago hit upon the idea of individuals that can be born and that can birth distinct individuals and that can die, unlike many squishy sea creatures and plants that are more amorphous masses of many headed many fissioning siamese twinning connected lives.
so we are born, we give birth, are blood is easily spilt, we die.
then we became vertebrates. birth, some childcare, eating, killing, being killed, social groups, communication, sensuality, mating, raising kids, death.
then we became primates. complex ecosystems, social groups, intensely visual, vocal, jungle dwellers. again, we are large. If the simplest life, a bacteria is dance of a 100billion molecules abstracting it, distancing it from that level of reality, then we are a coordinated confederation of 100billion bacteria abstracting us, distancing us from the basic gut level of how life works... by now we mostly live in our mental world... perhaps already forgetting that we are ephemeral dances on Earthbreath. perhaps already most vertebrates think of themselves as THINGS.
then, quickly, we became human. the climate wobbled abit, chased us around, we danced with it, left the forest, swelled our tangled neuron nets to 20billion, in order to cope? childhood lengthened, bacame risky, husbands became useful, we ate more flesh. we learned rhythm. we learned winding narrative. we became Homo aggressivusteamplayerus capable of banding together into some of the largest frighteningly coordinated hoards on Earth. we bagan to leave our mark...
we discovered communal ecstatic states.
all of a sudden each of us woke up alone under the skydome the skullvault of such a labyrinth that every time we use it to contemplate itself, it's limits expands ever further from itself. We invented all manner of frightening and mesmerising infinities...
along the way... well, primates were never as diverse as ungulates (hooved animals) or rodents or even bats... they never really left the tropics. the apes... not a very big clan at all, a rather risky experiment. for awhile, a few million years we experimented ourselves. there were perhaps a few different kinds of us in africa and asia at the same time, for awhile we were not too dissimilar from our other ape relatives. not certain if any of us noticed.
but by the time we became Homo aggressivusteamplayerus, we tolerated no one. whether they fell by the wayside or whether we murdered or ate them, our relatives started to dissappear. all hominids are now gone. and the other 5 ape species are loosing ground rapidly. we tolerate no one who is different. we tolerate no one who reminds us of our animal past?
so we are basically alone. not quite. we soon enough took up with wolves, horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, hogs... but really alone. the wolves turned dogs are the best chance we have of an animal companion to remind us from whence we came, perhaps to teach us some sanity? have we made dogs more insane than they've kept us sane?
to be continued.
possibly with:
eve eats the cerebrum fruit
where new ideas can evolve
weaning ourselves from this mind
initial cosmic rebellion against flesh
but oddly with this mosaic of genes in a mosaic of humans on Earth TODAY there does seem to be a statistical norm, most males are male most females are female, most children surviving infancy are not joined to the hip and have their organs, their sanity intact, and spend most of their lives in human society, approximating some norm of humanity.
is to be a human a statistical concept?
why are there only ONE species of human alive today? how much of our humanity do we share with chimps, dogs, dolphins, elephants, all of life?
is the human mental experience outrageously qulitatively different than that of chimps dogs dolphins elephants...?
(i can't even ask these questions the WAY i am asking them without being in the tradition of science)
so what's the statistical norm of humanity today?
living eukaryote metazoan vertebrate mammal primate ape human each of these imparts an onion layer of quality to the human experience. or... is our basic oxidation reduction fatty chemistry at our core or is it our experience of being lost in this tangled labyrinth of 20billion neurons at our core?
we are ephemeral dances played on the congealing and expiring chemistries of Earth breath. How many molecules does it take to dance one of us living creatures? even the simplest among us, a bacteria takes about 100billion molecules to dance it in half a dozen levels of hierarchy in a couple thousand different reactions. so we are VERY far from the basic properties of physical law; quantum behavior, wave particle duality, elactromagnetic forces. we already start out as abstracted from the physics that is our ground. so we are not objects, we are dynamical mathematical dances being played on... we are ephemeral, taking part in a long journey of evolution of the forms of this dance. genetically even we are not individuals. yet we cohere. it is an odd mix. science does not yet have a good handle on how this maelstrom of chemical cycles coheres. There is alot of math involved.
Life is danced on 100s of billions or more dancing molecules, and life has been dancing LONG. 3.6billion years, almost as long as this Earth has been cool enough to have us. the dance steps take place a billion times a second. a billion billion dance steps danced by a million billion billion dancers. Organized. with physical law way way down below. and mathematics. that's the stage we were born into. there may be more stages...
we are momentary coming together places of breath in the grand cycles of Earth breathing. what one critter exhales another inhales, what one critter puts together into it's body another will take apart. therefore life eats life to live.
we are creative, each of us can be the place where new form is invented, the beginnings of a clan of new creatures that can spread accross the Earth and change it. On the flip side we are also vulnerable to horrific physiological failure, not even making it past being a zygote. basically we are the experimental thougths of this evolving journey of life on Earth.
our coherence is vulnerable.
we belong to LOOOONG family lines. lineages of grandmother after grandmother after grandmother.... a BILLION generations long. these populations weave in and out of that long history spliting, sometimes joining, The space of forms we can explore is is unimaginable. our exponential growth allows us to explore this space very thoroughly, reaching all sorts of odd corners of it. But much more forms are possible than can fit on this finite Earth, so 99.99% of our possible selves become EXTINCT along the way.
hence what exists at any particular moment are bands of organisms isolated by long histories of extinctions between them. the members of each band related to each other, the bands different from each other, seperated by extinction. Coming along for the ride with us are more than 2million different species of life on this planet today. so ignorant are we that we don't even know if it's 2million or 200million. the incredible range of the ways to be alive, most of us are ignorant of. We can relate to dogs, parrots, turtles, Cichlids(fish that take care of their kids in families) as pets. these are all vertebrates. vertebrates are just ONE of over a 100 basic different clans of living creatures. the creativity is immense.
are species coherent? this is currently a mystery, the verdict is out. it appears that many are somewhat coherent, each remaining stable for only a few million years out of the hundreds of millions of years of play, then they transform, split into many or disappear.
our branch of living creatures (the chordates) appearing more than 100million generations ago hit upon the idea of individuals that can be born and that can birth distinct individuals and that can die, unlike many squishy sea creatures and plants that are more amorphous masses of many headed many fissioning siamese twinning connected lives.
so we are born, we give birth, are blood is easily spilt, we die.
then we became vertebrates. birth, some childcare, eating, killing, being killed, social groups, communication, sensuality, mating, raising kids, death.
then we became primates. complex ecosystems, social groups, intensely visual, vocal, jungle dwellers. again, we are large. If the simplest life, a bacteria is dance of a 100billion molecules abstracting it, distancing it from that level of reality, then we are a coordinated confederation of 100billion bacteria abstracting us, distancing us from the basic gut level of how life works... by now we mostly live in our mental world... perhaps already forgetting that we are ephemeral dances on Earthbreath. perhaps already most vertebrates think of themselves as THINGS.
then, quickly, we became human. the climate wobbled abit, chased us around, we danced with it, left the forest, swelled our tangled neuron nets to 20billion, in order to cope? childhood lengthened, bacame risky, husbands became useful, we ate more flesh. we learned rhythm. we learned winding narrative. we became Homo aggressivusteamplayerus capable of banding together into some of the largest frighteningly coordinated hoards on Earth. we bagan to leave our mark...
we discovered communal ecstatic states.
all of a sudden each of us woke up alone under the skydome the skullvault of such a labyrinth that every time we use it to contemplate itself, it's limits expands ever further from itself. We invented all manner of frightening and mesmerising infinities...
along the way... well, primates were never as diverse as ungulates (hooved animals) or rodents or even bats... they never really left the tropics. the apes... not a very big clan at all, a rather risky experiment. for awhile, a few million years we experimented ourselves. there were perhaps a few different kinds of us in africa and asia at the same time, for awhile we were not too dissimilar from our other ape relatives. not certain if any of us noticed.
but by the time we became Homo aggressivusteamplayerus, we tolerated no one. whether they fell by the wayside or whether we murdered or ate them, our relatives started to dissappear. all hominids are now gone. and the other 5 ape species are loosing ground rapidly. we tolerate no one who is different. we tolerate no one who reminds us of our animal past?
so we are basically alone. not quite. we soon enough took up with wolves, horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, hogs... but really alone. the wolves turned dogs are the best chance we have of an animal companion to remind us from whence we came, perhaps to teach us some sanity? have we made dogs more insane than they've kept us sane?
to be continued.
possibly with:
eve eats the cerebrum fruit
where new ideas can evolve
weaning ourselves from this mind
initial cosmic rebellion against flesh
Sunday, March 11, 2007
miracles
-then she said
when i long for real communion with the Divine, does she long for me too?
i want to believe that she does, but i find it difficult, with 6.5 billion other people in the world, and endless galaxies spreading through space.
-so i said
without us the divine pops into existence like a fractal dust of miracles, countless sparkles and antisparkles throughout the universe. constantly anihilating each other back out of existence. she yearns for us to catch the sparks of herselves before they go and give birth with them into worlds.
when i long for real communion with the Divine, does she long for me too?
i want to believe that she does, but i find it difficult, with 6.5 billion other people in the world, and endless galaxies spreading through space.
-so i said
without us the divine pops into existence like a fractal dust of miracles, countless sparkles and antisparkles throughout the universe. constantly anihilating each other back out of existence. she yearns for us to catch the sparks of herselves before they go and give birth with them into worlds.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
well, the blog is getting stuffed!
it's got a table of contents. soon i will turn it all into a bonafide website and put some order to it. it might even begin to make sense.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
