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Some thoughts about the eternal mysteries

Discipline is a mental game. Basically, the problem with discipline seems to be that it is a fight between several parts of your psyche. One of them knows you should get up now and do something specific, because unless you do it, your situation is going to get worse. Sounds to me like a pretty rational part of the psyche, but what is it? Is it the ego?

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Be it as it may, it seems to have a counteracting force, which seduces you into a state of inertia, hibernation. For some reason human beings enjoy the state of doing nothing. This may be a design flaw which is compensated by us being receptive to changes in levels of hormones and various other regulatory mechanisms, which shift our moods. That way we usually feel bad, when doing nothing. Most of the time. But being the clever lazy mammals we are, we are finding plenty of ways how to bypass that: by drugs like TV, chocolate, food in general and other things based on a perceived "something for nothing" deal. I mean if you watch TV you don't do a damn thing, you just sit down, shut up and watch. and you get information in return, a pretty convenient deal. But isn't it degenerative to the human potential? What is human potential anyway?

Let's face it, we humans seem to have not only a purpose, but also the innate desire to seek for purpose. May be the latter causes the former, or the other way round. Pretty hard to say, which way the causality is flowing, if a concept like causality even is applicable in a situation like this. But nevertheless is seems to be so. Just compare the human form to that of other mammals or animals in general. We are bipedal - we walk around on two legs, which frees up the hands for doing other stuff with them. Like throwing a stone. I find it fascinating, that the human is the only known living organism with such evolved hand-eye coordination, that it can hurl objects across some distance with great efficiency. We have opposable thumbs, so we can grab tools. In fact, one thing which seems to be uniquely human is the usage and creation of tools. We are a tool making program of some sort. Like Terence McKenna said: "we are taking matter and connecting it from lower to higher degrees of organization by putting it through mental filters". As if the human imagination was acting as a catalyst for the transformation of matter. Are we agents of change?

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Looking at human history it sure seems to be so. Once humans obtained what could be described as self-aware, self-reflecting consciousness, the degree of change present in nature went through the roof. Change, which has been expressing itself by slow natural selection of the most favorable forms of being and their interactions with each other, has been confined to the genome (or so it seems) for billions of years. With the arrival of the self-reflecting mind, this changed and information arose from the genome and started flowing around in new forms of its organization, as culture, scripture and language. These are making radical speed of change possible. Just compare (or imagine) the mental state of someone who is living in Victorian age Britain with your own. Imagine having no idea of the concept of a computer, TV set, automobile or even the telephone. They simply don't exist in your world. If you want to visit someone 50 miles away, you will have to take the weekend off as you transport yourself to his place by foot or carriage. And you probably have to arrange the meeting weeks prior, because you don't have a phone to pick up and call the person, so you agree on your next meeting by writing and sending a note. How different would your mindset be, living in an age like that? And that's only 5 or 6 generations back. In fact, all of human history is the product of maybe 2000 generations of people. 2000 generations. A number which probably wouldn't be sufficient for natural selection to change something really basic in a form of being, like the color of its fur. Then again, I'm no evolutionary biologist, so what the hell do I know, may be it would. But the notion that language and culture are making it possible for change to occur at a much faster rate than biology ever dreamed of, seems to me self-evident.

May be this is, in fact, what nature has dreamed of: having a tool for expressing its genetic intent, which isn't bound by the confines of organic biology, where change has to subject itself to dependency on random mutations being presented to the process of natural selection. We have obtained a powerful tool for processing, analyzing and combining, may be even creating information - our mind. We have little idea how it actually works but it seems to be doing an excellent job at doing stuff with information. The problem with the mind seems to be, that while we have been given the tool, we haven't been given the manual. We have to figure out how it works by ourselves, by trial and error, while most of the operational software remains hidden from our conscious examination. Also it's hard to judge what constitutes failure and what success, if you have no idea what standards to judge the results by. We are having trouble agreeing on what speed limit to apply to drivers of automobiles in a city, how can we expect to create widespread agreement about what constitutes proper progress of the human race? We are like a person who wakes up in a room with a bunch of people and tools in it, connected to a maze of other rooms. Kind of like in the movie "the Cube" but only with 6 billion people and lots of rooms with lots of stuff in them. Who knows what to do, if you have no idea why you are there, who put you there, you are even amnesiac about who you are and you have absolutely no clue where you're going and whether the path is in your hands and if there's something to be found beyond the confines of this maze. Good luck trying to figure out this one.

Yet we seem to be equipped with some basic answers, which are information embedded deep in what we perceive as "being human". Preserving life seems to be one of them. In all situations, you have the desire to preserve your state of being. You want to live. Most of the time, you want other members of your own species to live as well. Compassion towards non-threatening other species seems to be universal to the human state, too. We sleep when we are sleepy and eat when we are hungry. And we do, make, create...what? What the hell are we trying to do? Just what in the hell is the human agenda? Nobody seems to have a clue. It's like we have this great sense of urgency which is pushing us towards doing something, but we don't know what it is. We just figure out things as we roll along the historical process. And we tend to forget what has been, where we came from and we tend not to think about where we're going too much, because we'd just get depressed. If you're heading for a brick wall, you don't try to worry, you enjoy your last few moments. There are billions of people like me in the world? How could I make a substantial change even if I wanted to? From the perspective of the self, it seems an impossible endeavor. Even if you try and come up with some crude perception of the context of human beings in the universe, you have major trouble communicating it to other members of the same species! Pretty frustrating, if you ask me. We are like deaf people trying to discuss music. We have some knowledge about its existence, because we are sensing the patterns of vibration in the air. May be there have been individuals who were only half deaf and they were trying to express their sense of wonder about what they have experienced. But how could we understand each other if we don't have the proper linguistic tools? Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, it has been said. So we dance, write, sing and wonder. But none of it seems to make things any more clear to us, because we're missing the majority of the picture, because it simply defies explanation as we fail to condense its meaning into language.

Because what the human mind produces, besides tools, is culture and language. And slowly our minds have conditioned themselves to accept the premise, that what they have created is real. Well, is it real? Is culture reality? If it is so, reality must have a really peculiar relativistic attribute to it. How else can you explain the vast differences between the worldview of a militant Pakistani islamist and a Tibetan monk, if you want to classify them both as "real"? And they live not too far away from each other. What culture seems to be, is not reality. It is a caricature of reality. A cartoon version, if you will. It is what we have dreamed up reality to be and to mean, most likely molded to support our own ends, which come from who-knows-where, the ego probably. It is the operating system of our brain in a particular set of circumstances. Is it not obvious that today's western culture is a product, a tool of some sorts, which enables the members of the species, which find themselves at the top of the hierarchical organization of society, to control and regulate the rest of the population with greater efficiency? And the question whether this has been created by deliberate acts of policy (leading to speculations on conspiracy theories), or whether it's just an unforeseen consequence of the historical process, seems to be not that important to me. The mere fact of its self-evidence is what baffles me. If you ask any human being, anybody, if he or she thinks the world is heading into the right direction, they'll most likely say "no". There's so many negative externalities to the blind raging of the materialist-consumer society, that none of us really feel comfortable with it. It's like having a crazy uncle. Everyone is uncomfortable and awkward around him, but no one wants to be the first in line to get rid of him. His name is probably Sam and he has a lot of money, so you want to keep him around.

Take the Amazon rain forest as an example. A biosphere which can be described as nothing short of "divine" and "perfect". Thousands upon thousands of different lifeforms, all crammed densely into an area, all interconnected, communicating, maintaining what could be described as a "dynamic equilibrium". Leave the forest to itself and it will continue to live as a constantly changing expression of being. Within minutes of a leaf falling down on the ground, grass-cutter ants have dissected it in order to drag it to their hideout where they use it as a basis to grow mushrooms, which they consume and use to excrete substances which get assimilated by the interlocking grind of plant roots in the ground. Round and round it goes and it works so perfectly smoothly, without any need of external intervention, because the biosphere is able to maintain itself. What a miracle. And we destroy this, because we want a new mahogany desk to impress our clients with. Why do we do that? Are we fucking idiots?

Our whole species seems to be in some kind of a state of collective neurosis. One quote comes to mind: "If we could feel, what we are doing, we would stop doing it". Seems self-evident upon closer examination. If we could intimately relate to the disastrous consequences of catching too many fish, cutting too many trees, turning too many natural resources into non-natural chemical compounds which the biosphere is unable to assimilate into its cycle of life, I imagine we would scream in horror and immediately stop doing that. But we don't. Does this have a reason? Is this a required trait in a species, which is meant to make tools? Is nature fine with this? What it basically boils down to is the question of whether we are just another link in the long peculiar chain of events which constitute the cosmic evolution, or whether we are some kind of gross freak accident, which will be erased from the cosmic book of evolution as a particularly bad mutation, not suited to compete in the evolutionary process.

In trying to look upon the human species from a perspective of cosmic evolution, it seems to me like at one point or another someone or something asked the question: "I wonder what would happen if we give those monkeys self-reflecting consciousness". Well, this is what happens. You get an instantaneous explosion of overpopulation of tool-building monkeys, which move around in vehicles running on fossil fuels, trying to kill and cheat each other over who gets to be on the highest branch of the banana tree. If there is some kind of intelligence present in this process, I'd like to talk to it.

You there. I don't know whether you deliberately planned this. I have no idea if you just set things in motion and sat back to watch what happens. Maybe you are guiding us in some mysterious way all along. May be you are God and you are malevolent, or benevolent or may be you are free from such ambiguous human definitions. May be you are a single entity, may be you are the collective consciousness of everything. This seems kind of pointless. I mean, I have no idea who or what I am, how can I know who you are? But nevertheless I want to ask you something: are you happy with the development of events? Is everything on track? Did we fuck up? Because I feel kind of bad about it. I feel like we are failing you. Somehow we have been entrusted with the most complex organizational structure in the universe, which is known to us - the human brain and we keep using this delicate tool as a convenience how to settle disputes by inventing scams and power structures instead of beating each other up with whatever is available to us. Not only that, we feel pretty bad about ourselves, so instead of humbly admitting our fuck ups, we keep hoarding and fetishizing objects and idols, engage in wild, obsessive, unexamined behaviors destructive to ourselves and our environment, just to forget about how bad we feel about ourselves for a minute, to escape the torturous reality of not knowing our purpose and place. We put on our Armani suits or Dolce & Gabbana jeans and our idea of an evening well spent ranges between getting shitfaced on alcohol while howling obscenities on the street and snorting cocaine of the ass of a hooker at a smoke filled club. We want respect, but we do little to earn it. We are ego-maniacal prepubescents, drunk on a Saturday night, because parents have left for a business trip. We feel like the kings of our apartment, we drink all the alcohol, eat all the food, destroy the furniture, because what the hell, it's not our problem, we are young, we are free and we don't give a shit. Let someone else sort this out for us. Is it time for our species to become more mature? Is this a test? It's hard. So hard. Is this how the forces of what we call "natural selection" in Biology (which in fact may be something beyond our wildest imagination and comprehension) work on a cosmic scale?

As far as I've been told the universe sprang from nothing in an instant and for no reason. It seems a weird notion, considering the state it's in now but it's as good as any other. Because in fact, I think, none of us have a clue. We like to think we have, because it makes us feel smart and we kind of like that, I guess. Then we preach it and may be kill the people who won't agree with us. But that's just childish disputes over who gets to have the favorite toy at the kinder garden. What's beyond, we don't know. The popular story at this time and place is the story of the Big Bang, which I've mentioned. In the beginning, so the story goes, there was nothing and somehow, the vastness of what is now the universe in which we live in, with its stars, galaxies, quasars and what-have-you was condensed into a singularity. From there, for some reason never mentioned, it erupted into a pool of pure energetic plasma, which started to expand (into what??) and as it expanded, it cooled. Somehow cooling brought about the possibility in change of its form. Electrons settled into stable orbits around atomic nuclei, atoms started to combine into more complex molecular systems, which somehow started to change, interact between each other, forming relationships and eventually the basis for organic life and the genome. The genome started expressing itself by random mutations caused by external forces, while the mutations most adaptive to those external forces came to reproduce themselves, while the others have been erased from the gene pool. And so it went for billions of years on this particular tiny piece of solar driftwood. What a complex system of interlocking genetic material it has spawned! and eventually along came the monkeys who developed self-reflecting consciousness for one reason or another and here we are now. It's absurd. I'm some kind of higher animal currently using it's fingers to express linguistic intent by pressing on some buttons in order to form a long series of symbols, which are culturally sanctioned elements, bound together by a grammatical system, in order to express meaning. And yet I don't even know who my grand grandfather was. What were my ancestors doing 500 years ago? 

We are a bunch of amnesiacs. We choose not to think too much about what happened prior to last Friday night, so who cares what happened a thousand years ago, or even millions? Somehow we deem this to be irrelevant to our current condition in our arrogant assumptions about our perceived role in the cosmos. We like to think about ourselves as the pinnacle of everything, pure awesomeness, but somehow we don't want to be held responsible for our actions. But yet we have this sense of urgency haunting us, we want to do something. But we want others to do the dirty work (read: thinking) for us. We sense, deep within, that we are meant to do something. At the same time, we fear failure. So we delegate power to psychotic individuals who then go on to scream to large masses of us about millennial eugenic plans of ethnic cleansing, holy religious quests and other fun activities.

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The great architect of communist China, Mao Zedong, thought it was a good idea to order the farmers in his country to fabricate steel in the backyards of their farming estates instead of cultivating crops. The rest of them would meanwhile run around killing some kind of sparrows who were labeled "enemy of the state" because of who knows what strange reason. It turns out the sparrow was a natural predator to some kind of insect which in turn loved to feast upon the same crops as we do and millions of people died from malnourishment. Behold the glory of centrally managing a system with inherently decentralized information structure. It's not until disaster strikes us that we realize we have been engaged in some absurdly insane behavior, but everyone who remembers how this particular mess came to be is either already dead, or "too old to be taken seriously", so we put a new label on our organized madness, elect a new psychotic individual as our divine leader and start the whole crap again in the naive belief, that "this time it will be different". I feel so pathetically stupid about being part of this.

What this all seems to imply to me is simple: we can't do it by ourselves. We need help. We are little children who have somehow stumbled upon the secrets of nuclear fusion and genetic engineering but our ethics or our code of conduct have failed to evolve at pace with our technologies. The power our technologies and tools have given us, has grown immensely disproportionate to our own wisdom and understanding of our own situation. We just can't handle it. We're like this guy you keep hearing about from time to time. Unemployed, won the lottery, blew it all away, now he's 10 million in debt and more miserable than before. We engage in nonsensical chaotic destructive behavior, turning our weapons against each other and ourselves, becoming more and more alienated from each other and just about everything else around us. We get depressed so we take prescription drugs. We get frustrated so we cuddle up inside our own imagination and dream about what might have been. From time to time we try to give some particularly agitated group of individuals the approval to try and fix things like they see fit and they fuck up every time. Then we run a bloody revolution and change the individuals at the top instead of changing our own thinking. The idea of the scapegoat is as popular as ever. It probably has something to do with the fact that we as a species have been preyed upon for millions of years and the "one dies for the sake of the rest" paradigm is a simple fact of predation with which we have been confronted for so long. But the very idea of the human ego being able to regulate complex systems with decentralized information is beyond preposterous, but still we cling to this notion with all our might. You want to redistribute wealth in an economy, because you think you have the mental capacity to correctly analyze where it should and should not go? You will fuck up. You want to regulate your body weight by regulating the input of nutrients you take into your body? You will fuck up. That's what we always do if we try to control something. We fuck it up. There are no bonus points for good intentions in nature.

At this rate, we'll all be dead in a couple of decades. There are physical limitations to the quantity of beings which can be supported by our biosphere. Especially if those beings consume so much of the biospheres resources. We can't just multiply ourselves with the expectation of participating in an ever rising standard of living for each one of us. We have been clinging to this illusion for so long now. But now our economical system, which we have used as a tool for reaping the benefits of high specialization of skills and division of labor, is collapsing upon itself, because we have been looting our own future for decades. We have amassed unrepayable amounts of debt, which is the equivalent of saying "give me that hot dog right now and I'll pay for it later" an amount of times so huge, that suddenly you come to the realization that you and the next three generations of your offspring can't possibly pay it back, because even the amount of interest to be paid on debts due has become unserviceable. So what do we do? We shift the debt around like a hot potato and wait to see who gets to pay it. Those in positions of power do all in their might to convince us that all our problems will be solved by borrowing even more money we can't afford in order to buy some more stuff we don't need, because it supports the notion of artificial nominal "growth" of the economy, which is the alpha and omega. You are worse off than last year, you say? Well you must be a total moron, because the GDP is growing! As an arithmetical average we are all better off.

We never noticed the moment, when the "price" of things became dis-attached from the "value" of them. What our economy has become, is one gigantic construct of interlocking institutions and regulatory mechanisms looking to preserve the status quo. And what is the status quo? A permanent nominally growing gross domestic product, rising asset prices, which are then sold down to the public as a "general rising standard of living" in order to keep them in a state of confused satisfaction. "Well I don't feel better now than I did ten years ago, but all the economists tell me I should, so I guess I can't argue with that". But the biggest insanity in all of this is, that there is a notion inherent in this kind of thinking, the notion being that it is possible for the economy to grow endlessly. A pretty preposterous notion if applied on something, which is a subset of something else, which is limited (the biosphere). If your model has its own self-destruction built into its blueprint, you come up with all sorts of funny ideas, if you want to preserve it anyway. So at first we tried to monetize everything. Because if I grow my own tomatoes and make pasta sauce or ketchup, it doesn't reflect in the GDP. But once I take those tomatoes and sell them to my neighbor for 10 bucks, the GDP has risen and the whole nation has somehow gotten wealthier because of this. So we monetize stuff which has been free. First the basic, limited stuff. Like resources. You find an oil field, you get to sell the oil for a profit. You grow stuff in your garden, same thing. Further along the line we figured out we could sell information. The problem with that seems to be, that information is inherently free, unless you use force to guard it. So you do that. But you need resources for this kind of endeavor. Since selling information doesn't create enough of them, so what do you do? You either borrow money and promise to pay it back, or you simply take it from someone else, especially if you're an institution with the legal monopoly on the initiation of force - in short a government. 

Round and round it goes and there's less and less things to monetize and there's less and less people willing to lend their savings. Then some random event reveals, that we have all been connected by an interlocking grind of debt and obligation and that the assets of one institution are in fact the debt of another institution, which is in the same situation and one weak link in the chain of debt can cause it to break and collapse, which is what happened in 2007. The whole system built on trust comes crashing down so once again we turn to a bunch of psychotics to sort this out for us and boy do they sort it out! What's happening now in the world with all its consolidation of centralized political and economical power, all the printing of money and artificially low interest rates is the preparation of the single biggest fuck up in the history of mankind. You think Hitlers genocide, Stalin's gulags or Mao's "great leap forward" were fuck ups? Wait until this baby gets rolling.

The problem seems to be, that we can't afford any more failures. As a species, we have failed over and over again, only to arise somewhat stronger in the historical process. But that was back in a time, where the worst thing we could do to the environment was to cut down a few trees in order to make tools to throw at each other. But now we have attained so much power. With the switching of some buttons, we could blow up the whole planet, that's how powerful we've become. Just take a while to imagine that!

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With great power comes great responsibility and human nature in its current form, while being excellent at making sophisticated tools thanks to the power of labor distribution and specialization, seems to be absolutely unsuitable for holding any kind of power. This is what we need help with. We're like the super villain from a comic book, who could become a constructive force of magnificent beauty, if he only got some anger management lessons and therapy. But who's going to help us with this? Will Angels descend from the heavens and enlighten us by whatever astral means? Are we going to get contact with some advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence, who has been through a similar mess and is willing to help us? Will Gaia change the resonance frequencies of our morphogenetic fields to cause a global shift in consciousness? Will the Internet come alive as a sentient amalgamation of human knowledge and guide us through this rough time with love and compassion? Who is going to help us? I am so afraid, helpless and confused because of this situation and I imagine I'm not the only one who feels this way.

"God helps those who help themselves", so a saying goes and whether you choose to believe in a deity of some sort, or not, I think there's profound wisdom in it. How can we expect anyone or anything to offer us help, if we don't show our own determination to cure this neurotic state we have found ourselves in. But how do we do that? What's to be done?

Everyone knows things are bad. What I think we could try, because as far as I can see, it really hasn't been tried in our modern history, is to stop running around frantically, accusing each other of being responsible for the whole mess and just stop for a minute. A day, or a weekend. Stop chasing our grand illusions, sit down, take a deep breath and stay in silent wonder for a while. Just stop. Shut up. And watch.

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Imagine a weekend, where the whole economy has been brought to standstill. No banks or shops open, no radio broadcasting, no TV, maybe even no electricity. Just people gathering in nature around a fire with some food and drinks, totally free from all constraints of daily live. The machine has been brought to a screeching halt and for the first time we have the opportunity to stand still and reflect upon our path, where it has come from and where it is heading. No worries. No Hurry. You're not going to miss out on anything, because there is nothing to miss out on. This is it. Just people talking to each other, dancing, singing, getting loaded. Isn't this what we said we've been working for all this time? What would we do on a weekend like this? Would we get to talk to each other without pretensions, assumptions and prejudices, imposed upon us by our perceived roles in society? You won't be your profession, you won't be your social status, your bank account, your designer furniture, your car, your religious assumptions. In the end we're just that. Just the naked self-reflecting monkey mind. We need to stop for a minute and think about where we're going and where we want to go. And I really think we can go anywhere we like, but a change of leaders or a change of the system of societal organization isn't going get us there. We need to change our minds. Maybe this has been the punchline all along. If a species attains the ability to actively change its parameters in accord with the evolutional demands of the planet, universe, whatever, it becomes one with everything. It ascends into Godhood, enlightenment, Nirvana, whatever you wish to call it but it seems to indicate a state of mind and being, where finally all is in perfect harmony. Maybe this is what we are trying to do. We have seen a glimpse of perfect harmony, be it through religious revelation, altered states of mind, observance of nature, dreams or who knows what mechanism, but we tend to think it's there. The perfect, ever-changing dynamic equilibrium of everything that we have fallen away from for some reason. We want to get there, we just don't know how, because we haven't answered the question, which immediately precedes it, namely: What is it we want to attain? Where do we want to go?

And maybe this is all just wishful thinking and the human abstraction of nature, or the universe being a loving, caring entity of affinity to all life, is just a childish illusion and we're all alone out there. Just another random mutation in the cosmic evolution - a toolmaking monkey with an ego - nice try, thanks for playing, but this isn't what the universe is looking for, next please. Maybe we will become victim of some natural catastrophe, some black hole sucking us in, a meteor striking the earth in half, alien intelligence, whether extra terrestrial, or man made getting rid of us for one reason or another and maybe we will express ourselves as a self-devouring leviathan, which feasts upon its creator, until they're both dead and we will become another entry in the list of dead end roads of cosmic evolution and somewhere, some less idiotic species will figure out what to do with the gift of consciousness and do who knows what with it, but it won't involve destroying itself. Maybe this has already happened. There's so many questions and not a single answer which brings me full circle to the beginning of this literary escapade: what do we want to do? What do I want to do? What do you do, if you can do anything?

Michal Nejeschleba

Michal Nejeschleba

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Som takmer štvrť storočia starý, pánom svôjho času a tak premýšlam nad tým, ako žiť svoj život v tejto zvláštnej dobe.Občas sa mi podarí niečo o tom napísať. Som vďačný za komentáre a cením si všetky formy feedbacku :) Zoznam autorových rubrík:  SúkromnéNezaradené

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