Mansplaining “Functional” Hierarchies

Recently, I found out that I really hate the word hierarchy. I came to this conclusion after arguing with an old, ex-Facebook friend about “functional hierarchy“.

I fundamentally don’t believe any human hierarchy can withstand the corruption of thought. It is thinking too much that has gotten the world into the predicaments it is in, thinking is not the God it once was, and it is not going to get us out of our messes.

We are like 10 billion baby birds clustered in nests of endless thought and thinking, and we are terrified to fly. This will make sense if you keep reading! But before dropping into the underworld, you better watch this Mother video!!!


Meghan Trainor — Mother (Official Music Video) — How to Stop Mansplaining | Thank You EJ!!! This is so Awesome!!!

This whole convoluted conversation happened because of a very simple question I asked about a diagram this particular man made about Transformational Change.

In the graphic he posted, I noticed there is no pathway for what to do if people don’t agree on the type of Transformational Change needed or on how to implement it.

So, I made the following comment:

On the outer circle of Discuss & Agree... what happens when you Discuss & Disagree or even further have Conflict?
Without this other very real possibility included in a realistic way, this is a closed-circle of "Liked-minded" thinkers who will grow smaller and smaller in their shared beliefs and ideas of Transformation, which they may conclude: "Needs to Be Imposed on Everyone Else for the Good of the World."
So much trauma and cycles of destruction, reprisals, vendettas have emerged out of Closed-Systems of Thinking ending in "Do Gooder" agendas.
What do you think?

Well, maybe I was a little too provocative and Alan Wattsy in my comment when I ask about Do-Gooder agendas. He probably has no idea what I mean. But, as you will see, he assumes he knows what I mean… but he has no clue.

What I am referring to is explained simply in this video:

Alan Watts – The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

His response to my comment is as follows:

true. Which is why this model aims to 'transcend to THEN include'... the ethical commitment to act on behalf of the whole.
Can you show me a model where informed democracy is addressing Overshoot? No... there is, unfortunately, a functional hierarchy which needs to honour those who CAN see more, sense more, grok more, on behalf of the whole system/social field. This is only part of the process 😎
If interested you might find more here (it's a link to his website...)

GULP! Now, I have a whole bunch more questions!

Really, he has made a mental model that CAN identify people who have transcended and these people get admitted into some governing body who will make decisions and act on behalf of the whole?

Does this mean, the whole world?

Does it mean all the misfortunate survivors of the coming catastrophe that is going to destroy most of mankind …pick your catastrophe: climate change, nuclear war, AIs take over the world; they do this because they were given instructions by a Do-Gooder programmer desperately trying to make the world safe for all life, so the AIs decide that humans have to go to make the world safe for more lifeforms.

You think I am exaggerating?! Then, you better listen to the Godfather of A.I.s as we know them today. He cracked the code for how the human mind works and implemented his understandings to machine learning. And did you know machines hallucinate? Well, the intelligent ones do! I think this is utterly fascinating!

The Daily | The Godfather of A.I. Has Some Regrets | Thank you Carrie & EJ for drawing my attention to this must listen to episode!!!

I also know that this guy (and many others in his circle of friends on Facebook) fervently believe the world is going to collapse, and it is going to be God awful, so we better have a plan.

Knowing this, and assuming I survive the collapse, what if I don’t like this transcended group of people who are going to jump into action with their plan to save us and ensure only actions that benefit the good of us all are implemented?

And Grok?!! Really, is this like Mork (where is Mindy?). Or is Grok more like super Geeky?

Whatever it is, I don’t think I want anyone grokking for me.


I should have given up the ghost at this point, but I was stupid and engaged further saying:

Ah yes, functional hierarchy like what we see in the Good’Old USA 🇺🇸 or Russia 🇷🇺 sure is showing the world how much more they see than the rest of us can see on how to make the world Great again!
I say this tongue and cheek but without allowing for conflict even on the highest levels of hierarchy, I just don’t see how the human race is going to be doing much transforming any time soon, except maybe some fizzy bubbles 🫧 on the sides of spaceship Earth 

By the way, I could have also brought up China’s ambitions, North Korea’s ambitions, India’s ambitions, Saudi Arabia’s ambitions, and the newly incorporated states of mind and ambitions of Trump & Company, Elon Musk & Companies, Zhong Shanshan & Companies, Bernard Jean Étienne Arnault & Companies, and the list of corporations who make more money than most countries GDP is endless. But, I didn’t want to overwhelm him.


He responded with gusto! Writing the following response:

At this moment I've just watched a program on Al Jazeera on Black Lives Matter, and seeing (one of) the deep dysfunctional divisions in the US - the US is in collapse (see Umair Haque or Chris Hedges) [OH?!! Thank God this guy knows something I didn't know! Thank God We're going to die!], and will continue to split apart along these and other fault lines as biophysical reality gets harder to cope with (with climate change and ecological collapse and resultant economic collapse - which is already happening).
These divisions are caused by competing for identity (and survival) at a level less than that needed for the higher-level collective identity - in the words of one commentator the 'more viable future' would be 'a multiracial society that can live in harmony'.

I need to interrupt here. This guy has just made a huge pivot and is lecturing me about my own country! I live in the United States of America. In fact, I live less than 5 miles from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC.

Now, I’m not putting Al Jazeera down, but since I live here and I must navigate these competing “identity issues” every day, I think I know a little bit more about them than he does or a single documentary can cover.

In fact, I’ve made a few documentaries myself about these very divisions and dysfunctions.

Here are just a few of them:

Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (2)
Black Lives Matter
Trump Rally about a Month and a Half Before Jan. 6 | Cacophony — The Beautiful Humans of Earth
Sustain the Flame – Full (Best Version) Women’s March on Washington 2017
Women’s March 2018 — Can’t Delete Reality
March for Truth — Watergate Redux
March for Truth — State of World
Sioux Z Dezbah at Women’s March on Washington — 1/21/17
Science March | 6 years ago
Sapience Talks — March for Science — Climate Change is Critical | 6 years ago
March for Science — Climate Change is Single Most Critical Issue | 6 years ago
Sapience Talks (#3) — Science Builds Communities
Sapience Talks – Day after Comey is Fired — interview 1
Sapience Talks – Day after Comey is Fired — interview 2
Sapience Talks – Comey Fired – #3
Sapience Talks #2 — The Intersection of Science & Spirit
Web of Lies — March for Truth
Women’s March 2018 — Diversity
Women’s March 2018 — Handmaid’s Tale
Women’s March 2018 — Stranger Things
March for Our Lives | 5 years ago
Never Again | March Against Gun Violence | 5 years ago
Deep Forgiveness (Darryl Green) & March for Our Lives | March For Our Lives | 5 years ago (This is the only one this ex-friend watched and made fun of it.)
Orange is the New Black — Science March 2017 | 6 years ago
“I Want to Be a Scientist” — Science March 2017 | 6 years ago
College Students Climate March | 6 years ago
Curiosity & Human Civilization – Science March 2017 | 6 years ago
Science March 2017 — Bio-medical Robots | 6 years ago
Science March 2017 — Bio-medical Research and Cuts to NIH | 6 years ago
Teens – People’s Climate March | 6 years ago
We ARE the Monsters | 6 months ago
We Are the Story Earth Needs | 4 years ago

Whew! I bet you thought I’d never stop listing them!


Back to ex-FakeBook friend’s comments.

When I refer to 'functional hierarchy' I mean the sort of hierarchy that every natural ecosystem has - nested, holonic, and operating on behalf of the whole AND with diverse individual yet interdependent autonomous beings. In nature this animate intelligence expresses itself through co-evolution and within the higher 'goal' of 'life'.

AH!!! The baby birds! I bet you read this far to see what the 10 billion baby birds in nests is all about! It’s about this comment.

First of all, I bet this ex-friend doesn’t know that being a baby bird in a nest is the most dangerous time of a bird’s life. It is a time of flightlessness that make baby birds vulnerable to all kinds of threats--crows, squirrels, snakes, cats, even wind.

The best thing for a baby bird to do is grow up fast and get the heck out of the nest!!! And have you ever looked at a nest after all the baby birds have left? I have! It’s full of poop!!!

I am not very impressed with his responses so far and started to do my own research on how to run a country or run a bunch of survivors after a great BIG disaster.

I quickly find based on his reference to nests, which I think he wants it to sound NATURAL, that he really doesn’t mean ‘functional hierarchy‘ at all — if he is really talking about a natural system where there is lots and lots of diversity and autonomous living beings walking about and doing their thing, then he is talking heterarchy; full stop: NOT hierarchy.

I found an article rather quickly in Forbe’s about all of this and this article led me to Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles. I will talk more about this later. But clearly my ex-friend has never heard of Philip or his book.

Also, before moving on to the rest of his comments, let’s dig into this word holonic:

A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole in and of itself, as well as a part of a larger whole. In other words, holons can be understood as the constituent part–wholes of a hierarchyWikipedia

It is also a fundamental theory of machine learning. So, we are back to the end of the world by A.I.s!

Who knows, he might even be the Do-Gooder programmer who writes a well intention code to save as much diversity of life as possible that ends the human race because the AIs determine we are killing life faster than we are preserving it.

And the last thing I want to know: has he talked to this animate intelligence himself?!

How the HELL does he know that this thing or being has a higher goal and that the goal is life?

First of all, I know he doesn’t believe in God, but this is sounding a lot like a God with goals who is going to Make Something Happen!

This an important clue to his thinking, and it provides a glimpse into the Mega Myth he fervently believes runs the universe.

This myth is The Fully Automative Model. This short Alan Watts tells it best!

Alan Watts – The Ceramic and the Fully Automatic

Alright, I’ve digressed enough, so back to his comments:

In Human systems we most often have structural hierarchies, with power-over dynamics. We DO need ways of inviting (creative) conflict across difference to discuss the options in front of us; and a functional Democracy is meant to assist that process. And, it can... but often at a level that is removed from the emerging future realities of biophysical collapse.

Wow I’m so glad he pointed this out to me. I would still be thinking humans who live in great BIG civilized systems still gather around one GREAT BIG camp fire singing Kumbaya to solve conflicts!

Is he possibly admitting that there should be an arrow in his diagram for conflict?!!

We could have ended this entire conversation right here!


But wait! He goes on!

If democratic representatives were aware of the biophysical realities within which all their ideas and creative options are nested (functional hierarchy) then perhaps they might make collective decisions in mutual interest at levels required for what's coming. Unfortunately most people are ecologically illiterate and removed from nature so they don't realize that their current comfort levels and assumptions of entitlement, and fear of others taking them from them, are threatened by bigger, more encompassing forces (that will affect everyone) that will cause massive suffering as whole systems collapse.

Fine, these are overly broad generalizations that basically paint a picture that pretty much every human being living in a civilization on Earth is an illiterate, fearful, comfort-seeking coward with entitlement issues. If he wants to define nearly 10 billion people on Earth in this way, he’s not all wrong, but neither is he all right.

In making all my documentaries, I met and talked with so many motivated, well-informed, highly intelligent people who had profound ecological awareness and were not sitting home eating Cheetos! Rather, they were getting on a buses at 3 a.m. to get to marches happening in Washington, DC on Climate Change, Science, Gun Violence, Trump, Lies, and Black Lives Matter.


Perhaps he’s simply mansplaining again. But he still has more to say:

My point about 'transcend' is that only people that understand this can see which futures are no longer viable. That does not mean they 'know everything' - but it does mean they have a different worldview. They cannot guarantee 'the way' to go - there is no single direction. They can however point to many of the non-ways to go, because of Universal Harms that would and do threaten Universal Interests - not just the vested interests of any particular group that sees 'others' as the biggest threat to their identity and wellbeing.

Oh goodie! Transcendence! Yes, I really want to know more about what he means by transcend!

But, Hmmmmm… there are ONLY a select group of people who can understand this? My father was a pastor. My grandfathers were pastors. My great grandfathers were pastors as were many of my uncles and cousins… and you get the picture… I have been steeped in the language and imagery of transcendence.

What he describes is not transcendence. It’s intellectual arrogance, which is super creepy. At least he recognizes he and other transcended individuals might not get it right and cannot guarantee “the way to go“.

I remain highly concern about how power and authority is being ranked and sorted in his System of Transformation.

How is this really complicated human issue of governing itself in ever bigger and bigger systems of humans going to decide and select people to serve on this “functional hierarchy“? How in the HELL are they even going to recognize Transcended individuals?!


First of all, I don’t think you can recognize transcended people. In fact, for thousands of years, human beings typically tend to kill people who have transcended, in other words people who have become Holy.

Why do humans kill Holy people? Because Holy people scare the crap out of us regular, run of the mill human beings.

And why is this? Because Holy people are Whole people–they have fully integrated their Light and Dark sides, their Good Side and their Evil Side, the Savior and the Devil. This is not my idea. This is a very ancient idea as expressed by Alan Watts.

Alan Watts – The Holy Man and Insecure Societies

So, if you think you are a bunch of highly intelligent Transcended people, you probably aren’t. But if you take the reins of ruling a great big bunch of humans, and you believe you are a transcended bunch of bloʊks, then you are eventually going to have to decide who lives and who dies.

Running huge human systems is not for sissies or for people who are squeamish because Nature makes LIFE and DEATH decisions every day, and if you think you are a bunch of Transcended humans running things like NATURE does, then guess what!?? You are going to have to make these kind of decisions too.

If you don’t, Kaboom! Another disaster! Overpopulation, perhaps like The Mote in God’s Eye, which is a science fiction novel by American writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, first published in 1974.


This story is about human beings first contact with an intelligent alien race. How exciting, except these aliens are more intelligent than humans and they keep something concealed from the humans who are trying to decide if they are friends or foes. The thing they are hiding is population issues…really, really serious population issues that have caused this ancient race of intelligent beings to rise to spectacular heights only to crash back down into primitive savagery again and again and again… something they call Cycles.

Image from: BAEN eBooks

Such big and complex decisions required to run an advanced, intelligent civilization (regardless of whether they are human or aliens) depends entirely on what is being valued by the group and by who wants to do the running of things.

How is this any different than what is happening in the USA, in Russia, or in any hierarchical system on Earth? In fact, how is it different than how corporations, cities, towns, non-profits, and pretty much every modern, technology-using human system (and perhaps even intelligent alien system) are deciding how to run things?

If an intelligent group of beings decides to run things by a hierarchy, then they have to decide first on what they value. Based on these values, a ranking is created that determines how the hierarchy will be structured.

In other words, the values selected determine who will be placed on top of the pyramid to give to the orders and who will be placed in the middle and bottom of the pyramid to listen to and follow the orders. Another way of seeing this, is that the people in the middle and on the bottom (everyone who are below the ruling class) are the ones doing the work to hold up the agreed upon values.

Everyone–this includes rulers, managers, middle managers, bosses, workers, and through much of human history, slaves–assumes the mold of the Functional Hierarchy. Another way of saying this is that every person assume a role that holds the mold, which operates constantly in the background of everybody’s mind who lives in the system. This operating system provides unconscious instructions sort of like an algorithm, which are a set of rules to be followed or calculations to be made to solve problems encountered as the system operates through time.

The mental model of a pyramid is a powerful system of thinking. Indeed it is machine-like. It can be cold, calculating, and extremely brutal, perhaps this is why humans are so found on hierarchies, regardless of if they are functional or dysfunctional.

However, whenever (wherever) humans create hierarchies to run things, lots of people and things don’t make it to the top of the pyramid because they simply don’t fit into the desired values of the “functional hierarchy” (something humans created based on arbitrary ideas and values). The people and things (living beings) that get left outside of the ideal are automatically de-valued. Clearly, something important is being left out, being ig-nored, by the very ideas necessary to create a Functional Hierarchy.


Let’s see if he answers or addresses any of these concerns because so far he has not. But he’s also not done explaining (or should I say mansplaing):

In our approach we don't create 'safe-spaces' where everybody stays in their comfort zone. We create 'safe-enough spaces' where people are challenged. From our website Glossary: (his website again and another diagram)
“Safety is not the absence of threat—it is the presence of connection.” 
– Gabor Maté
We use the term to describe spaces where we can have challenging Courageous Conversations about difficult topics, involving rigorous inquiry from multiple perspectives, and still hold space for “respectful belonging” where we can appreciate one another as we live the questions together.
Part of our approach is to hold people 'safe-enough' while challenging them not to collude at levels less than the biophysical system dictates is needed - ie. face reality and live the questions, together, in Universal Interests... and, yes, you are right to be cynical, for it is virtually impossible from this starting point... especially in the US at present.

Hmmm… I don’t really have a problem with all this mulling about safety and safe enough and challenging people. But he is not providing a tangible way of doing anything differently than what we are already doing in the world with all our hierarchies, functional or not!

And, WOW, he is really putting the USA down! I never knew he hated Americans so much!!!


So, once again I press on when I should have stopped writing this:

So how do you select people: "that understand this can see which futures are no longer viable."
How do you ensure all peoples, the ones still asleep in the safety of civilization and the people awaken to the the coming collapse, are represented in the decision-making of the 'functional hierarchy' (I don't think you used functional previously, but that is beside the point)... who gets to decide what is functional and belongs in a human hierarchy?
Might it not be our very own overthinking of every problem and solution digging us all deeper into the pit of collapse?
And who is "our" in approach? Is this the synthesize of your years of deep thinking and consideration, which is considerable and done with empathic intent, or are there others involved in the "our"?
And, you did not mention Russia or Putin? How does this transcendent approach handle this situation? Or is this Western propaganda at work blowing up the situation in Ukraine?

One quick side note on overthinking and/or clinging to an idea or a thought when clearly one should have let go of it long ago. When a person does this, the idea or thought tends to grow smaller and smaller.

This is because the process of thinking presses the LIFE FORCE right out of an idea or a thought. The more the LIFE FORCE is removed, the less and less alive the IDEA is inside ones mind, or should I say the MORE DEAD the IDEA BECOMES.

Every single person who is born into Western Civilization is trained to do this from the day they are born. It is essential they learn how to do this and to do this all the time so that they stay in the social order, the social hierarchy, regardless of it is a functional one or not.

Alan Watts and many of great sages of Buddhism speak a lot about the need to let go of our ideas and patterns of thought and beliefs. They encourage us to fly, not to cling to dead and dying thoughts that make us do ignorant and increasingly crazy things. Once we outgrow our ideas or learn something new, we need to let go of them and move on with the flow of all things living in time and are alive.

Drawing from Notebook on 4/24/23 | Pressed into the Mold or Clinging to a Thought Until All the Life Is Drained Out of the Idea

Now, back to his thoughts and thinking:

...thanks for engaging. First, re 'functional hierarchy' I did mention it 😉

I don’t think until this point he knew who I was, and I hit a nerve for sure: a functional nerve! In his original invitation for Transformational Change anyone, he does not mention functional. That is what I was commenting about. The first time he mentions functional and hierarchy is in his first comment to my original question. And his answer to that question is what made more questions in my mind.


But, he goes on:

"Can you show me a model where informed democracy is addressing Overshoot? No... there is, unfortunately, a functional hierarchy which needs to honour those who CAN see more, sense more, grok more, on behalf of the whole system/social field. This is only part of the process 😎"

There’s the Geeky Grokking again. And the inference that some human beings are better than and more advanced than others, in what precisely?!

If you read it as hierarchy then you probably didn't see my point... it is a natural functional hierarchy - which many debate, but which does exist, based on maturity, capability, consciousness levels and activation (or not) of human development potentials - NOT a constructed human hierarchy (like an imposed boss/ servant relationship - with power over).

OH WOW! He says it again, it is a natural functioning hierarchy! Which apparently should make all the difference something like what Simba discovered, right?

Alan Watts & David Lindberg & The Lion King – Who Are You

But, no, my ex-friend is not talking about a Natural System because he is dividing and cutting it up into all sorts of categorizes by using labels such as maturity, capability, consciousness levels and activation. This is what the thinking mind does; it cuts up reality into little tiny bits then messes them up, so we can never put it back together again…just like Humpty Dumpty or at least not as long as our selfish, self-center, fearful, greedy human minds are in control of the narrative.

And, he’s still not done mansplaining. So maybe there is still something in his explanation that won’t make the hairs stand on my arm.


Here he goes! Hold onto your steering wheel:

That said, people are, despite their best wishes and hopes NOT equal [I don't disagree with this, but please...] every parent knows this... you don't force a kid who can only crawl to walk before they are ready (or at all);[Well... duh!] yet you can assume they have the potential, and, if they see others doing it, will one day also do so - where does the leadership example come from...? Another younger kid? An older kid? An adult? [Ah, perhaps here's the natural functional hierarchy...you age into it? Is this what he's implying? Well, I take issue.] Hence we need to be careful NOT to assume people don't have 'potential' while also recognising that not everyone has actualised it yet - that's why we generally don't let kids drive trucks. [Haha -- he hasn't been to the USA! Here, we can do anything at any age!]

OK!!! Full Stop!!! We’ve got to explore this explanation a little bit more!

Hmmm… maybe babies can drive trucks!

And what if the evolution of mind runs in reverse to the evolution to the physical body?

Above, the trajectory of growth of the human body is indeed as he describes… until… the decline begins. However, many of the most ancient sages say we come into this world perfect and through the trials and journey of life, our consciousness narrows and shrinks and becomes less and less than what it started out as… until… the physical decline begins!

I’m a MOM! I’ve raised a baby! Yes, my baby crawled, then she walked, and now she drives a truck!!! It all happened exactly as he says…LOL!

But, I don’t think WISDOM grows that way. I think on the Mental-Spiritual realm (this gooey, sticky place inside the human mind where we feel this utterly strange sensation of sentience, something we all simply refer to as consciousness) that growth rather runs in reverse to the body.

As we grow up, we get narrower and narrower in our thinking and focus. We are forced to shut out more and more of the world from our MIND so we can carry out the tasks of daily living (or survival in a manmade world). Eventually, we all get to an incredibly small world views with an incredibly small selection of thoughts, ideas, values that we think explain everything. What we fail to see is we have become a SINGULARITY and we are COLLAPSING in on ourselves!

This sounds terrible, but this is the mental world… not the physical world. This moment of COLLAPSE is the most exciting opportunity ever! It the MOMENT of Transformation.

The thing you got to do when you get to this MOMENT is KEEP MOVING… go man go!!!

Whatever crisis you hit, it’s there for a reason. It is your DOING, your HAPPENING because you want to GROW and TRANSFORM is what consciousness does... it is flowing, it is dancing, it is constantly making new patterns and experiences.

I can’t tell you what your moment of crisis will be or when you will hit it. But if you are human, you’re going to have a chance to thread the eye of your MOMENT IN TIME.

Each of us is born into this world with utterly unique capabilities and potential. Each of us is trying to master innate abilities we have always had, but we forget we have them because of all the training we get into HOW TO BE A GOOD CITIZEN.

Don’t get me wrong! There is tremendous value in this. Going around and hitting other kids over the head is not a NICE way to move through the WORLD (Trump and Putin obviously never moved passed this stage in mental development).

We all want civility in this world. That is how we all live in peace and plenty, but we cannot master our innate abilities without really digesting and integrating ALL the knowledge trained into us on how to be a GOOD CITIZEN and RECKON that with WHO WE REALLY are (and have always been since the day we were born).

Without this reckoning that is really going to feel like a constriction, a tightening and reduction of consciousness, you won’t get to other side of your Self.

If you are paying attention, there is going to a point of crisis in your life that is going to make you question everything. And this is ALL RIGHT! In fact, it is essential.

But, if you are not paying attention (Ron DeSantis, I’m talking AT you), and you don’t want to WAKE UP, then you are not going to WAKE UP. And this is ALL RIGHT too!

The only thing I can tell you if you do hit this point of constriction is:


But wait, my ex-friend is not done mansplaining:

Unfortunately many in politics (such as your infamous ex-Pres) reach arrested development at a level less than what is required to provide systems-ethical leadership for our times. Bully boy narcissism (pick any number of exemplars, globally) is not what's called for when the potential extinction of humanity is the writing on the wall. 

[What did I tell you? He is totally into total collapse of our global system...and human extinction. But maybe we deserve to go extinct and resistance is futile, so why suffer the inevitable? It's a collective gamble that we all clearly lost...right?!!]
See — I love to make funny pictures of Putin and Trump!

But this also pissed me off. Not the Bully Boy Narcissism comment, that just made it very obvious he is not paying attention to me or my work (as he pretended to do for years).

If he had been paying attention, he might have learned something NEW because I’ve been writing and posting about all this stuff (some stuff very humorously, some very critical of our ex-President) for a long time.

Basically, my take away from his comment is that he is implying this functional hierarchy is most probably going to consist of a lot of grumpy old men and a few token women who refuse to grow up.

I know this guy from lots of previous engagements, and I can read between the lines, and this is exactly what he is saying.

He is also implying HE is the one who can see further, run faster, and out think all the rest of us to lead this NEW functional hierarchy that will save the world from collapse (or after collapse)!

It leads me to wonder just which direction is he and his new functional leaders going towards? Is it truly the “right” direction to be looking or is it just more of the same tangled web of endless bureaucracies we are already stuck in up over our eyeballs already?

So these are some of the reasons this comment really pisses me off.

And also, some of the wisest, kindness, most inclusive people I know are young people. I would totally choose a younger people over jagged jerks like my ex-friend is being here as he defends his fictional “functional hierarchy.


But, maybe I should still be patient and read keep reading:

As for "who are we when I say 'our'" - I provided a link to 'our' website - And Now What - and this is the About Us page - https://andnowwhat.be/about/ - and, yes, it is the result of "years of deep thinking and consideration, which is considerable and done with empathic intent" by each of us alone, and for several years collectively.

______

YEAH! Finally! He is addressing the Putin bastard and dysfunctional Russia!

As for Russia or Putin - what can I say... he would not be included in the 'transcendent' because he is, by definition, not aiming to transcend and include (partly my point) but to take-over by force... which, incidentally, also happens to be the way the US generally behaves - and it will continue to do so, for it fears losing the dominance its inhabitants take for granted, and fears what would happen if others behaved toward it as it has toward them.

But, hey wait! That is a huge BIG pivot! WOW, he really hates us. He didn’t even finish his thought about Russia.

I was REALLY hoping to learn something about his thinking on Putin.

Several years ago, back when we conversed all the time, I told him that the most evil character in my book is based on Putin. This was before Putin invaded Ukraine and Trump was cozying up to him like a pussy cat to a snake or is it a snake to a pussy cat or are they really both SNAKE CATS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe Putin and Trump mated and mutated!!!!!!!!!!!

Viral ‘Amazon Snake Cat‘ Has the Internet Totally Baffled | WOW! I want one of those!!!

He immediately put me down by lecturing me on how Putin is a pussy cat, really he isn’t a bad guy at all, he’s just watching out for his country like any good ruler would do. And, it’s a BIG country he has to take care of and the world isn’t very nice place, especially the WEST. He told me that I was simply indoctrinated by Western media and didn’t understand things accurately.

He kind of sounded like Trump (?!!) in that moment! I have never forgotten his put down. And, it’s probably the real reason I needled him.


But, I have digressed again! Let’s get back to his mighty man-splaination!

So, to be clear - I think you have just pointed to why there needs to be distinction between those who CAN think transformationally, on behalf of the whole system, and those who can only think of their own vested interests or for a smaller subset of the whole (individual, in-group, corporation, nation)... 
So, if you had to try to create transformative change that might get the US out of the mess it has created for itself, who would you select? Who would you not select? And why?

I’m fine with leaving Putin out of the hierarchy too… DUH!

But HERE again he pivots and attacks my country lumping the USA in the same dusty coal bin as Putin and his goons.

We are having this conversation, by the way, over the United States Memorial Weekend, which is a time we reflect on the men and women who have served in the Armed Forces, especially the ones who died or were injured.

I have 2 Great Uncles who served in WWI, an Uncle who served in Korea, and a brother who served in the Army Reserves. He’s really pissed me off NOW!

And Now What would have happened to the world if the US had not gotten involved in these great wars?

Would he really want a Kim Jong Un ruling over the whole Korean Peninsula? Does he know Winston Churchill begged the US to get involved in WWII? What if the US had just sat on its hands mumbling: “We don’t want to get involved in that war,” as it sang Kumbaya to itself as it pretended nothing’s going on over there?

Yes, the USA has made some really bad foreign affairs decisions. The US has sent troops into places they should not have sent them. The US has pulled troops out of places we have been when they should not done this: Afghanistan!!

What happened in Afghanistan is complicated. How do you define exactly when all the trouble began and how do you define when it has all ended? Was it 1219 to 1332 when the Mongol Empire ruled Afghanistan? Was it 1370 to 1405 when Timur (sometimes referred to as Tamerlane) ruled the land that would become Afghanistan plus a whole lot more of middle Asia? Both Empires are remembered for the barbarity of their conquests.

But that is ancient history, right? What does that have to do with the barbarity of our modern age? Well, have you seen Flee? If not, you should!

FLEE – Official Trailer | Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner FLEE tells the story of Amin Nawabi as he grapples with a painful secret he has kept hidden for 20 years, one that threatens to derail the life he has built for himself and his soon to be husband. Recounted mostly through animation to director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, he tells for the first time the story of his extraordinary journey as a child refugee from Afghanistan. Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen Executive Produced by Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Produced by Monica Hellström, Signe Byrge Sørensen
If you watch Flee, you may ask Why did the US fund the mujahideen?

Well that’s a long, sordid, complicated story that “began decades earlier, after the Soviet Union invaded that country in 1979. The U.S. wanted to do everything it could to counter the Russians during the Cold War. And so, at that time, the U.S. worked with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to arm Afghan Islamist fighters known as the mujahideen.” — Read or listen to PBS NewsHour and the Former head of Saudi intelligence recounts America’s longstanding ties to Afghanistan

This colossal battle between the two Titans of the Modern Western World, because if you’re going to be a Good Titan you’re going to need a Bad Titan. It has been this way in the human made world for 5,000 years. If you’re wondering why I pick this number, you are just going to have to wait and read my book.

Since WWII, the USA and USSR (now Russia) made so many Nukes if they went to war with each other, the world would descend into a nuclear winter so profound, life as we know it would cease. Something like Midnight Sky depicted:

Earth after some unnamed disaster, but most likely nuclear war | Midnight Sky
Midnight Sky

So instead, the US and Russia poke each other through proxy wars that create a different sort of consequence: Blowback. I am not as stupid as my mansplaining friend wants to pretend that I am, nor are countless Americans like me.

US support of mujahideen created Osama bin Laden who would train Saudi men to fly planes into buildings pulling off one of the worst terrorist event on US soil 9/11. Leading to the US invasion of Afghanistan and hunt for bin Laden.

How the USA pulled out of Afghanistan in 2021 was reprehensible. It made me really mad. We drove the Taliban out and killed bin Laden in Pakistan; who, by the way, played a huge role in funding the Taliban so that they would take control of Afghanistan after Mujahideen factions failed to establish a broad-based government after creating an interim administration in 1992.

The Pakistan government has repeatedly denied that it provides any military support to the Taliban in its diplomacy regarding its extensive operations in Afghanistan.82 Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban's virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support. -- Human Rights Watch

Pakistan did this because it served their interests. US stayed for 20 years to encourage democracy because that served our interests. Then, the US pulled out due to a deal negotiated by the Orange turkey himself, Trump, and implemented by Biden, letting everything all come crashing down again, just like what happened to Amin and his family on April 28, 1992, and the USA played a role in this collapse too!


If we are really honest with what is happening in the world right now, it has so much more to do with ordinary, everyday men and women and their individual and collective beliefs, values, and biases than it has to do with a big bad Russia or a big bad USA.

Oh yes, humans know how to cluster together into great, big, bad armies and nations. We know how to build pyramidsFunctional Hierarchies–structures that live inside our minds and operate endlessly like algorithmic codes transported seamlessly into our very souls on endless streams of thoughts (conscious thoughts or unconscious thoughts) and also the things we are told we must do or else!

We’ve been doing this for over 5,000 years. Creating human pyramids to get our way in this world; it is a very human thing to do. And it’s worked way too well!

Wherever Amin and his family fled, they had to fear the RULES and CUSTOMS of every country and nation where they had FLED desperately seeking safety… seeking a HOME.

How we treat the least of us is a global issue! Is there any place on Earth where humans have settled that can claim to be completely angelic and benevolent? Is there any nation, state, or city in the world from any time that has always made the right decisions at the right time, always and always and always… like a GOD or an angel?

I think my friend is a bit jealous of the USA’s status in the world because he knows his Functional Hierarchy is just a wish-dream. It is his performance; his great show in the world of men and their endless games of one-upmanships. Yes, indeed these are ships made out of thoughts built like pyramids. These Functional Vessels sail every day to the twin continents of Doom and Disaster.

This mansplayer knows very well where he’s going, and he also knows that he will never captain a ship as BIG as the Good’Old USA. But who cares?! He knows if he crows loud enough, long enough that we all just cry out: Hip, Hip Hooray–for that’s just what we say when another ship sets sail to the Land of Doom or Disaster!


Now, being pretty beyond pissed, I pressed him again:

I don't think you are really talking about hierarchies as how you explain it in the above comment.
Rather you are describing a Heterarchy, but this is your thinking and work, so you are absolutely free to name it whatever you like.
And, the And Now What? team looks exceptional 😉
As for who would I select? There is absolutely no one I would select to form a team to transform the Good'Old USA. There is no way I am in a position to see, understand, or hear all the voices and ideas that would be necessary to do such a thing... this country will either survive or it will die, as things in this world have always done.
And to be clear... I am of the USA... but I am not of the fraction in the USA who are dead set... "to take-over by force" (as you put it) ...the rest of the world. Nor do I "fear losing the dominance" in the world, nor do I "take for granted" that the USA has dominance or that my Whiteness gives me privilege in the world as we know it. And, I am not alone in knowing this... and in the face of the pressure to conform to the Mold, I resist it, as do many others here in USA and as reports come on in Russia, despite the threat of death there, while here, it harassment, lost opportunities, and hate.
I must surmise your opinion of the United States is as low as your opinion is of Russia. I suspect you are implying that the US flows in the very same vein and mindset of World Domination and Control as Russia, China, North Korea, the unincorporated state of Trump, the unincorporated state of Elon Musk, and anyone else with power, authority, or money who can make others submit to them.
But be careful of over generalizing systems. They are always so much more complicated than you can fully see and comprehend. This is why I remain highly suspicious of hierarchies, even highly evolved, functional hierarchies, because when it comes down to it... it is only made up of men (and a few token women).
I might suggest that I am like a very small cell like an antibody reacting and responding to an overwhelming spiritual-psychological-psychic Viral Infection that seeks devastation and to do harm to pretty much anyone who is not on the "inside" of the infection. 
And this infection is everywhere, not just Russia-USA, it is inside every human being on the planet, including myself... one can only acknowledge the infection is real, it is deadly, and it will not stop until human life is brought to its ultimate demise (self-inflicted and totally avoidable)... 
I find by the way, the youngest humans among us are the wisest and healthiest. If I had to depend on someone to carry me to a safe spot because I ran out of energy (due to fighting against the overwhelming infection that I know is inside of me and everyone else and an infection that I know I cannot by myself overcome) I would choose the youngest among us in the infected country formerly known as the USA.

He responds with the infamous:

When people do this on FakeBook when there clearly is not a sickness, death, despair, or trauma, it means: “Fuck off” … with a smile.

By the way, Alan Watts says the best leaders are the most Selfish! What he means by this are individuals who have thought about what being Selfish means. Alan Watts says it so much better!

Alan Watts – Selfish

Anticipating Mansplayer would not be able to explain to me why I should trust a functional hierarchy to save the world, I did my own research. This is what I found.

Heterarchy vs Hierarchy vs Anarchy

In a hierarchy, if A is over B, and B is over C, then A is over C — your basic pecking order. In a heterarchy, though, you can have A over B, B over C, and C over A. Think of the game “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” Paper covers rock; rock crushes scissors; scissors cut paper. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16

Heterarchy

“A heterarchy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets.” — Warren McCulloch’s 1945 essay

A HETERARCHICAL SYSTEM
In a heterarchy, as opposed to a
hierarchy, there is no “top” or “bottom” ranking. However, unlike in an anarchy, there is superiority and inferiority as each element is activated in some circumstances and inhibited in others. McCulloch calls these circular configurations of neurons: “dromes of diallels.”

Copyright Strat for 2016 www.stratfor.com

This is a fascinating article in Forbes: Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time. You need to read the whole thing yourself, if you are interested in this idea, but here are a few parts that really capture my excitement in discovering this word I did not know existed.

Interestingly enough -- and here's where both problems and possibilities start popping up -- this circular logic is identical to what Nobel economist Kenneth Arrow described as the "Voter's Paradox." The problem goes all the way back to the late 18th century when it was identified by Marquis de Condorcet. Consider the case in which one faction prefers candidate A over B and candidate B over C; a second, equal faction prefers B over C and C over A; and a third faction prefers, you guessed it, C over A and A over B. The choice that eventually gets made will not be a reflection of the real preference of the whole society, but will instead result from "irrational" and arbitrary issues like who voted first and who voted last. And over time and subsequent elections, the decision may cycle from one choice to another with no apparent reason. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16
Why the quotation marks around "irrational"? Because in the analysis of the relationship between hierarchy and heterarchy, it is precisely the definition of what counts as rational that is at stake. As McCulloch explained:

Circularities in preference instead of indicating inconsistencies, actually demonstrate consistency of a higher order than had been dreamed of in our philosophy. An organism possessed of this nervous system — six neurons — is sufficiently endowed to be unpredictable from any theory founded on a scale of values. It has a heterarchy of values, and is thus internectively too rich to submit to a summum bonum [highest good].”

— Warren McCulloch’s — “A heterarchy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets.”
Now there is a phrase to conjure with: "internectively too rich to submit to a summum bonum." This sounds like the Middle East. Or the geopolitical, global problematique. Or the Republican primaries in the United States. Or the problems of the European Union.
The problem with heterarchy, and the challenge to making it work, is not the lack of hierarchy, but too many competing hierarchies. And that's the reality we live in. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16

(…)

"Heterarchy" is an unwieldy word. Our ongoing discussion group on making heterarchy work eventually abandoned the word when one of our members looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and found the definition to be "rule by aliens." That's not what we meant at all. Despite its unwieldiness, and shadows of aliens, though, the term recommends itself for the way it mediates the dialectic between hierarchy and anarchy. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16

Hierarchies

As Francis Fukuyama showed in The Origins of Political Order, the first hierarchies were imposed by "strongmen" and then later justified by ancestor worship and a priestly caste. From all we can determine, primitive hunter-gatherer bands were heterarchical. Teamwork joining different skills was necessary to bag a woolly bison. But no one leader called for deference to a summum bonum.
With the transition from nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger settlements with agricultural surpluses, patriarchy and hierarchy were required to maintain some degree of order. As my colleague in this space, Ian Morris, argues in his several books, the bargain we humans made with hierarchies might strike a visiting Martian as odd once it compares the life of the unencumbered hunter-gatherer with the lives of later citizens suborned under often onerous hierarchies. But once you start down that road toward hierarchy, from the point of view of defense and security, bigger is almost always better. So there is a natural logic of larger, more powerful hierarchies conquering and subsuming smaller, less powerful hierarchies.
Next thing you know, people are talking about "the American Century," or "the Chinese Century," as if it is perfectly natural that some nation must be number one. I recall an invitation to give a talk at Rand a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The concern at Rand was how to manage a "unipolar world" now that the bipolar order of the Cold War had come to an end. I tried to tell the researchers at Rand about heterarchy ... but they were not interested. There was a mindset there, a hierarchical mindset, that insisted that somebody must be "number one," and it better be us.
You see this mindset at play in the well-worn epithet of the lion as "king of the jungle." Who says that the jungle has to have a king? The jungle is not a political order, however many alpha male gorillas may roam its paths. The jungle is an ecology -- an incredibly complex web of metabolisms, relationships and interactions, some of which may be hierarchical. But there is no summum bonum in the jungle. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16
The Lion King I Just Can’t Wait To Be King (1080p)

Three Types of Hierarchies

Chapter 25 of Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles. In those 60 pages, Bobbitt develops three scenarios:

“The world of The Meadow is that of a society of states in which the entrepreneurial market-state has become predominant. In this world, success comes to those who nimbly exploit the fast-moving, evanescent opportunities…

Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles
green grass covered mountain under white and blue skies
Photo by PhotoMIX Company on Pexels.com

The world view portrayed in The Park… reflects a society in which the values and attitudes of the managerial market-state have prevailed. Governments play a far larger role…

Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles
game map aerial view
Photo by Tom Fisk on Pexels.com

Finally, The Garden describes an approach associated with the mercantile market-state…

Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles
arched bridge over calm lake in japanese park
Photo by Ryutaro Tsukata on Pexels.com

Unlike the regional groupings fostered by The Park, the states of The Garden have become more and more ethnocentric, and more and more protective of their respective cultures.”

Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles
As you will not be surprised to hear, these scenarios and their names can be associated with certain geopolitical avatars, namely, North America for the wide open Meadow, Europe for the publicly managed Park, and East Asia for the ethnocentric Garden. "In a meadow all is profusion, randomness, variety. A park is for the most part publicly maintained, highly regulated with different sectors for different uses. A garden is smaller, more inwardly turned -- it aims for the sublime, not the efficient or the just."
Bobbitt then explores a range of drivers and trends, possible events and challenging decisions prior to the articulation of the three scenarios in which all of these elements play out in different ways. In my humble opinion, the truly remarkable climax of Bobbitt's very long book is the elegant construction of the heterarchy of choices playing out in the global geopolitical dynamic involving the United States, Europe and East Asia. -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes -- 2/4/16

If you read this far, you should go to the full article: Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time by Jay Ogilvy | Forbes — 2/4/16 and read carefully all the possible scenarios of the three different ways the 3 different ways of organizing hierarchies interact and lead to global outcomes. . No wonder my ex-friend is terrified, but then again, he is trying to solve an impending cataclysm with yet another type of hierarchy.

Hmmm… yeah… like that is going to work after more than 5,000 years of increasingly dysfunctional myopic hierarchies!


Overview of Philip Bobbitt’s Shield of Achilles:

For five centuries, the State has evolved according to epoch-making cycles of war and peace. But now our world has changed irrevocably. What faces us in this era of fear and uncertainty? How do we protect ourselves against war machines that can penetrate the defenses of any state? Visionary and prophetic, The Shield of Achilles looks back at history, at the “Long War” of 1914-1990, and at the future: the death of the nation-state and the birth of a new kind of conflict without precedent.

— Amazon


Mythos and Melodrama in the Philippines
Image from: Ezra Acayan/Getty Images

Another thing about hierarchies is that they can go sideways fast. Big ones can. Little ones can. Corporate ones can. Non-profit ones can. Peace-loving ones can. Bottom line, if humans build a hierarchy to run something, it seems too tempting for humans not to take advantage of it.

Also, governments of any kind are dealing with a lot of information, pushes and pulls, demands, crises, polls, budgets, public opinion (that is by definition pretty variable depending on the day) and so many more things. So to take a country like Russia or the USA and make the comments my ex-fakebook friend said is a pretty naive and ignorant thing to say.

This episode on Throughline is very compelling. If you want to see how easy it is for a hierarchy to go sideways, listen to this one.

Corruption. Wealth. Authoritarianism. Torture. These are the words many people associate with Ferdinand Marcos, the former dictator of the Philippines, and his wife, Imelda. But in 1965, on the day of his presidential inauguration, clad in bright white traditional Filipino clothing, Ferdinand and Imelda were the picture of hope and progress: the Camelot of the Philippines. They styled themselves as mythical figures with a divine right to rule, even as their democratic ascent reached a dictatorial peak.
Ferdinand Marcos ruled for two decades. And then, in 2022, more than thirty years after his death, the Philippines elected a new president: Ferdinand's son, Bongbong. Both in his campaign and since taking office, Bongbong has evoked the Marcos era as a golden age — effectively, rewriting history.
Welcome to the "Epic of Marcos." In this tale of a family that's larger than life, Ferdinand Marcos is at the center. But the figures that surround him are just as important: Imelda, his muse; Bongbong, his heir; and the United States, his faithful sidekick. The story of the Marcos family is a blueprint for authoritarianism, laying out clearly how melodrama, paranoia, love, betrayal and a hunger for power collide to create a myth capable of propelling a nation.
Today on the show, the rise, fall, and resurrection of a dynasty — and what that means for democracy worldwide.

The Freedom of Speech
Image from Throughline: Volunteers help roll up a giant banner printed with the Preamble to the United States Constitution during a demonstration against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling at the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall October 20, 2010 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Another thing about hierarchies is that they need to select and enforce the values that matter. But just as I was needling my ex-friend, how are these values selected? Are we conscious of them or not?

This episode of THROUGHLINE goes through the history and conscious and unconscious biases of the USA selecting and enforcing just one value: Freedom of Speech. If you are interested in this process, take a listen. It is worth your while!!

Book bans, disinformation, the wild world of the internet. Free speech debates are all around us.What were the Founding Fathers thinking when they created the First Amendment, and how have the words they wrote in the 18th century been stretched and shaped to fit a world they never could have imagined? It's a story that travels through world wars and culture wars. Through the highest courts and the Ku Klux Klan. What exactly is free speech, and how has the answer to that question changed in the history of the U.S.?

Anarchy

Most anarchists are disappointed hierarchists. From Mikhail Bakunin to Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, anarchists have taken potshots at the failings of hierarchy: They shoot holes in the purported legitimacy of exercises of authority, whether by the divine right of kings or the use of violence to impose subordination.
As Francis Fukuyama showed in The Origins of Political Order, the first hierarchies were imposed by "strongmen" and then later justified by ancestor worship and a priestly caste. From all we can determine, primitive hunter-gatherer bands were heterarchical. Teamwork joining different skills was necessary to bag a woolly bison. But no one leader called for deference to a summum bonum [the highest good, especially as the ultimate goal according to which values and priorities are established in an ethical system].
 -- Heterarchy: An Idea Finally Ripe for Its Time

So in summary of the Forbe’s article and Throughline episode, hierarchies can be concluded understood as:

“Not all good things go together

— Some Ancient Sage from a Forgotten Time

Organic vs Mechanical World View — More From Alan Watts

Throughout this series I have been trying to explain two fundamentally different ways of looking at our world, one characteristic predominantly of the West and the other of the East. And these might be called, respectively, the way of description as opposed to the way of seeing. The way, in other words, of understanding things in words or in terms contrasted with the way of understanding through looking and seeing a field or a subject totally all at once. Or you might call these the linear view (strung out in a line) or the total view (seeing all at once), or the serial view on the one hand as contrasted with the simultaneous view on the other. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Now, in classical Western science we have depended largely on this serial or analytic view, which understands the world by translating it into ideas, into words, or into, say, even series of numbers. The basic feature of it being that things are understood in a step-by-step way in sequence. And insofar as we constantly look at nature in that way, we tend to think of nature as something constructed—something, in other words, made or put together as we ourselves make and put things together through a series of steps. And perhaps this gives us the feeling that if we understood nature  sufficiently, if we understood in full detail all the steps which go to the making of our universe, we could ourselves make it. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Now, it’s here, you see, that we get a very fundamental contrast between East and West, and especially through Chinese and Japanese ideas of the formation of nature. Because for them it seems extremely odd to think of nature as being constructed or made by a sort of step-by-step procedure. Their feeling is rather that the world and its forms are not so much constructed as grown. And one of the most important keys to an understanding of Far Eastern thought is to see the difference between a view of a constructed world and a grown world. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Now, to give a sort of crazy illustration of this: supposing I construct something—for example, an artificial flower—and you know, when you get instructions, how to do this, and you buy a book of do-it-yourself artificial flowers, you get a step-by-step procedure which tells you what to do. Step one: take a piece of wire with a black button and fix it to the end. Step two: take the stamens previously cut out and affix it to the button. Next step: insert a disk of sticky material, push the wire through the middle, and then affix the petals. Here they go. And notice that, as I put them on, I take them from outside and around me—things that are bits—and I bring these bits together to make the flower a construction, or whatever form it is that I’m intending to create. And so from going around to the center, from getting something that was previously pieces and bringing it all together, I get my flower. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
How to make artificial flowers at home with paper / diy home decoration paper flower
But now watch how an actual flower grows; how it starts, as it were, from the center. And it unfolds itself not bit by bit, but all the parts of the flower exfoliating together from the center outwards, in contrast to the making process, which goes from the outside inwards. From a situation where the parts are originally all apart (all in bits) and then assembled, contrasting with a situation where you have some simple beginning (like a seed or a bud), and as it expands it constellates or forms its own parts from within itself. And this is the fundamental process of natural growth. It’s in the same way that the human baby is formed within the womb. It’s in the same way that, if you watch crystals under a microscope forming a solution, you will notice the whole area of the crystal, the whole structure of the crystal, coming into being all together at once, and you will not see a kind of bit-by-bit assemblage which we use when we make machines or make houses or make tools. Even when we carve a block of wood—although the block of wood is not originally a lot of distinct parts, nevertheless we work upon it from the outside towards the inside, whereas all processes of growth go from the inside to the outside. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Time-Lapse: Watch Flowers Bloom Before Your Eyes | Short Film Showcase
Now, in our current scientific way of thinking in the West, this kind of growth, this kind of formation, is always talked about in terms of what we call field theory; fields of force. And I suppose one of the most striking exhibitions of what a field is can be seen in looking at the formation of magnetic lines of force in iron filings—as when we take filings that are not magnetized, just thrown chaotically over  an area, and then, with the magnets underneath, notice that all the filings form together into a pattern, the whole area moving together, every single part of it simultaneously into its shape. And that shows us the whole nature of a field of force. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Magnetic Field Around Stack of Magnets With Iron Filings

(Blab, blab, blab…I skipped a lot of important stuff from his talk to get to the part that links up to my inquiry about hierarchies vs heterarchies, but what Watts says here is exactly what Jay Ogilvy is sharing in the article in Forbes)

And then, in turn, in the field there is a structure, and the structure of the field is thought of as governing the formation of the universe. And you may remember that, in the last program, I gave you a particular Chinese world which meant the basic pattern or order of the world. Do you remember this word, which is pronounced , and which had as its original meaning “the markings in jade,” “the fiber in muscle,” or “the grain in wood.” This word, then, designates the basic structure within the tao, within the fundamental field of the world, and thus its order—which can be, as it were, understood by looking at it, but is too complex, too much happening so fast all together at once, for us ever to be able to analyze it in the relatively clumsy language of words. Now thus, you see, it seems to us that that order is enormously complex. The order of nature, the order of beauty, the order of ethics—all these kinds of orders baffle us when we try to think about them bit by bit. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth
Lǐ 里 Inside – Chinese Word of the Day 每日一词
The “Tao” Explained: Deep Insights With Deng Ming Dao 道
But actually this order is only a complicated order when we try to think about it. I mean, it’s very simple, isn’t it, to drink water if you put it in a cup or a glass and toss it down. But it would be extraordinarily complex if one tried to drink water with a fork. And in the same way, the world and the order of the world, the activity within the field, seems incredibly complicated to us when we try to translate it into thinking and into words. But this, then, is the fundamental Chinese Taoist and Indian Buddhist view of how the formations of the world arise. Not by a step-by-step process which can be put down in a line like the instructions for making the flower, but by something which happens spontaneously all together at once. -- Alan Watts | Organism Earth

The centipede was happy, quite,
Until a toad, in fun, said, “Pray,
Which leg goes after which?”
This worked its mind to such a pitch,
It lay distracted in a ditch
Considering how to run.

Alan Watts | Organism Earth

Feature Archetypal Animation

Pyramids credit:TheDigitalArtist

Image from: Female Pyramid Head

Music:

Distances | H.U.V.A. Network

[9] Moon Town    6:21

For more pryamid people, see:

Satan’s Sister
Satan’s Sister Blog from December 21, 2021

For more on Mansplaining and Other cruel things people to on FAKEBOOK and other social media outlets, see:

If you have read this far, you might also enjoy this blog post
And this one!
Is Collective Transformation Possible?

All this writing about Transformation has made me remember that I wrote a blog about this very idea 6 years ago, way back when I started this blogging business (which is a pretty useless one at that).

One of my very early posts was titled Is Collective Transformation Possible? It was sandwich between my Girl With Dragon and Divine Dodo series. Also, I had just finished my Women’s March Documentary documenting why thousands (millions) of women and men around the world gathered to march against Trump and after doing all that work, well, yes, I was hoping some people would watch itat least some of it…and commune with me about some of the really important issues people were bringing up. We all felt what TRUMP stood for and it was revolting. But no one really watched my documentary and NO ONE communed (communicated) with me about any of the issues explored in my Women’s March Documentary, except my REAL friends in Germany.

I joined hundreds of Facebook groups to meet liked-minded people who might care. It was so exciting and so hopefully for a minute, then my time of constriction came.

I knew it was coming. I could feel it. It had been building up for quite some time. But no one I was talking to then understood what I was talking about. I told this one group that felt itself to be an extremely rare group of enlightened beings, that I needed to go through a very small hole or to make a very difficult journey. They just smiled politely and said: “Oh, maybe you’re already on the other side? Maybe you’re already HERE!!”

They were clueless like Jon Snow.

Ygritte “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”

And when my time of constriction gripped me with such despair that death sounded more pleasant that life and thoughts of violent murder and suicide floated continuously through my mind… all these NEW, hopeful, FAKE friends vanished like THE NOTHING. Many of my physical friends did too.

I was left to navigate my inner DARKNESS where a good part of my inner collective wanted me dead. I was drawing my journey. I was documenting my descent. But you know what Mansplanyer said to me at a point of crisis, a time when I simply needed a compassionate listener and occasional cheerleader? He told me he didn’t think the Dodo was a good look for me and I shouldn’t continue… people might get the wrong impressions!

The Divine Dodo – – Circles

Well…DUH, Duh, duh! Do you see what is happening to Dodo? He’s being crucified for GOD’s sakes! Don’t you think I know DEAD is not a GOOD look?

As my inner collective divided into fighting factions–some aspects of myself wanted to help me, other aspects not so much, my exterior collective crumbled as well. These were the real life people who said they were my friends but they dried up like the Great Salt Lake, leaving nothing to help me during a very difficult time–a kind word, likes of my blog posts, regular comments on my Facebook page–would have meant so much to me at this time.

The System of Facebook is not set up to operate with kindness and compassion. Rather it is set up for Performers to Perform.

I would soon learn all these NEWfriends were FAKE FRIENDS. They were happy to court my attention IF (and only IF) I FOLLOWED THEM. The more blindly I followed, the more FAKE ATTENTION they might throw my way, and even that was ify. Most just had to be constantly admired!

This behavior is called Bread Crumbing or Baiting. It is an aspect of a significant psychological disorder called Narcissism. And FAKEBOOK is especially calculated up to cater to Narcissists and for people suffering from the opposite imbalance of this disorder: the ECHO Personality.

Narcissistic baiting & how deal with it | 92,295 views May 14, 2023 (There is a reason this video is getting so many views! Every person in civilized society is dealing with more and more Narcissitic People more often)

I was an echo that nobody missed when my voice began to fail and fade.

I chose to surround myself and to trust people who were nesting, in hollow holonic circular thoughts that spun round and round shrinking, sinking, shrieking point of consciousness that was cut off from true human understanding.

I pulled the Cloak of Darkness and Doubt over my own head and descended into HELL.

Cloak of Darkness and Doubt

To be a genuine human being requires self-sacrifice. It requires suspension of thinking and judgement. It requires listening, sometimes for hours and hours and hours, as someone else wails in grief and despair due to the circumstance of their life. To be alive, to be a real authentic human being requires give and take… not just take, take, take… and abandoning others when they become a burden to you.

To be a trustworthy person, you have to be a person that another person can TRUST to be there when TIMES are TOUGH. This might require sitting for hours and hours in complete silence just being with another human being who is being crushed by their circumstances. It is only people who are capable of doing this who can be TRUSTED with AUTHORITY. Only people who other people can depend on to BE THERE when YOU NEED THEM can be trusted with the Authority to make decisions for the Greater Good, which might very well require the Sacrifice of Self.

March 2, 2022 Blog Post

Just like what is going on in Ukraine right now… hundreds of thousands of men and women are STANDING UP, STANDING AGAIST BRUTALITY… TO HELL with my MANSPLAYER ex friend who equates the USA with Russia! I STAND WITH UKRAINE! I stand with every person doing creative acts of resistance as well as every person fighting, killing other people to defeat Russia NOW!

This is the stuff my father did. He was never called to serve in a war. He was a listener. He provided compassionate assistance to anyone for as long as they needed it! He was a healer. He gave his time, his money, his life for others. This is how the world is savednot by abandoning each other when we need each other the most because it takes too much TIME! Time is all we have… and how we value our time decides the type of world we live inside.

Saving the World is not the stuff being hocked on FakeBook or pretty much anywhere you look or turn for security and comfort (not comfortable but for solace and support) in our modern, overly complicated, pyramid-based world.

We made this world out of thoughts! It is a world that forces every civilized person to Hold the Mold of their cultture, of their caste, of their race (because the Modern World is extremely racists), of their economic situation, and of their place in the social order (all the hierarchies in which they live and must navigate to work, to play, to live).

The Modern World was built by narcissists to lift up narcissists that is why narcissist are rising to the Top of Likes like frothy bubbles on FakeBook, this is why they rise and hold the highest levels of power in almost every modern human civilization on Earth–each one built out of pyramid schemes. That is why everybody wants to be a narcissist in our world or at least they need to learn to play with narcissistic people and like it. Because that is how you wield POWER in the physical world NOW.

If you aspire to be a narcissist, FakeBook is the place for you! There are so many narcissists playing and sparring with each other on FakeBook. And there are so many echoes (like ME) attracted to all the glittery, sparkly thoughts, ideas, wishes, and dreams the narcissists spin. But, they are simply spinning hollow holonic nests of dead and dying thoughts. And the spinning of these expiring, nesting thoughts creates a vortex that has a suck. And if you get sucked into one of these vortex (most often it is one of your own making), you are heading straight down to HELL.

I knew what was happening to me, inside and outside of me, 6 years ago. And, The Dodo knew that I had pulled the Cloak of Darkness and Dark over my head. The Dodo knew I did this to myself, but the Dodo did not judge… he was just there providing glimmering specks of creative imagination, LIGHTsparks of light (but not thinking light), that were guiding me through HELL.

And the Dodo was the one thing that Mansplayer didn’t want me to have. He told me to give up the Dodo, to stop drawing him!!! And, I did stop drawing him, but I also stopped following the Mansplayer. But I was still in HELL; however now, without my guide, the dumb, stupid Dodo! HELL is a place of our own making... HELL is where you doubt yourself! Doubt is the Dark Force!

From a blog published in May of 2021

In this old post where I wonder if Collective Transformation is possible, I provide a list and links to all the wonderful people I was meeting on Facebook 6 years ago. I cannot recommend any of these people today. Not the artists, musicians, or writers who are listed, but the people who made me DOUBT myself. These people I cannot recommend.

These people know who they are. They are the ones playing at DOING something to SAVE the WORLD. But they can’t even SAVE THEMSELVES much less take a MOMENT in their very busy days to HELP anyone else who is drowning.

OH NO!” You’ll hear them yell. “I can’t stop. You’ll slow me down! You’re too much of a burden in this state of despair. I’m the only one who can SEE more, RUN faster, TRAVEL farther than ALL the REST!! I’m the only one who can SAVE the WORLD!!!!

All of them yell this. Mansplayers and Womansplayers, there are hundreds of thousands of them all yelling different version of this chant night and day…telling you (begging you) to follow them! But the only place you are going to go if you follow them is down because without the super powers of kindness, compassion, love… these people, all of them, are just hypoallergenic hollow holonic nesters spinning around and around a vortex of their own making, drilling deeper and deeper into the darkest parts of themselves on streams of endless thoughts.

You are MONSTERS…you people who pretended to care about me and then abandoned me when I really needed a helping hand. You, the ones who treated me as if I were the contagion, while in reality it is you suffering from the most prolific pandemic of our MODERN time: Narcissism and Supreme Ignorance created by OVERTHINKING. This is the Greatest EVIL of our TIME. We are all vulnerable to it but some fight it off better than others.

 Signs You’re Dealing With an Evil Person | 3,150,085 views Sep 5, 2020 (and more and more people are dabbling in the DARK TRIAD of psychological disorders)

I don’t know how I survived this time. It lasted for more than 6 years! But the story that my very dear friend from college told me about her suicide attempt somehow stopped me from mine. Today, I don’t think Collective Transformation is possible, even though this is what my story is about. The one I have been writing since 2012.

Have a GREAT DAY! And, remember, GO FOR IT! Follow your passion and whatever you do, keep moving, don’t stop!

Satan’s Sister | Moonrunner by Dance With the Dead

Living In Uncertainty

Right now, as of today, the 2023 Alberta, Canada wildfires have burned over 842,000 hectares that is casting smoke that can be smelled in Washington, DC.  
Meanwhile, Typhoon Mawar is bearing down on the island of Guam. This is a Category 4 Typhoon with sustained winds of 135 mph and storm surge expected to be as high or higher than roofs of one story buildings.
These are dangerous events that threaten lives and will destroy property totaling millions to billions of dollars. And these are just the latest in a series of serve weather events bearing down on the world--be it astounding flooding events, tornadoesderechos, fires, and many other severe weather events (click on link to see just the list of 1 billion dollar disasters in 2022).
Layered on to all this killer geologic events such as recent killer earthquakes in Turkey and Syria or the Hunga Ha'apai volcanic eruption and tsunami that impacted the entire Pacific Ocean in 2022. And now, Popocatépetl a massive volcano is waking up outside of Mexico City.
Mexico’s Popocatépetl volcano eruption prompts evacuation warnings
Layer onto theses events pandemics and lockdowns
Layered on top of these events are mass shootings in the USA...a civilization so polarized, it's paralyzed.
Layer onto all of this the War in Ukraine with 18,280 casualties (6,596 killed and 11,684 injured -- stats by Radio Free Europe) along with nuclear saber rattling by the crazy tsar Putin driving Russia into the ground and North Korea accompanied by Xi Jinping, China’s very uptight and control freak ruler, eyeing Taiwan

Human beings have always lived in uncertainty. It is only recently we feel it isn’t normal to feel uncertain about something.

But what if we need uncertainty to thrive?

Uncertainty has largely been replaced by routines made very predictable and reliable by all our technology. Living life today is so much more predictable than living it just 70 years ago, much less 150 or 700 years ago. Some may say modern human life is downright boring until something unexpected, unplanned, unpredictable occurs. Then, suddenly we may feel uncertain, anxious, uncomfortable, frighten. We want these feeling to go away because these aren’t the nice feelings we are suppose to feel in our technology rich, everything is at your finger tips society.

But wishing this to be so would be a huge mistake…

Do you want to know why?

Well, I’m not going to tell you. I’m going to let you dwell in a place of uncertainty and let you see what you find out.

However, I will provide a few road markers, if you are willing to take the voyage into the uncomfortable space of being uncertain, not knowing, a place that feels more than a little bit unhinged.

Are you a voyager?

E5 The look of today “Enigma” Unofficial Music Video

Let’s find out what your look of today really is? Let’s dive into if it may be possible to imagine and see a different look… another way to live a modern life? Does this make you feel uncertain? Is this a bad feeling or a good one? Why?

Let’s explore some more….

Constant Emergency

The first road marker on this voyage into uncertainty comes from Humankind Public Radio in an episode called Constant Emergency.


This audio documentary explores what constant emergencies do to people. It delves into what living in constant states of anxiety and fear does to a person’s psyche and sense of wellbeing. One thing we know is that constant states of emergency translates in our bodies as constant Fight or Flight mode. Being constantly in Fight-or-Flight can generate unrelenting stress and anxiety that can further translate into violent self-talk as well as violence to others.

Image from: HumanKind Radio | Constant Emergency
Have we entered an age of unrelenting chaos? As we grope for a “new normal”, has humanity reached a kind of turning point?
It feels that way — in the wake of the Covid pandemic, intensifying impacts of climate change, the war in Ukraine, mounting threats to our democracy, repeated mass shootings and so much more.
In this timely audio documentary, you’ll hear inspiring stories of survivors. We also listen to health care providers, clergy and others who offer specific guidance to help people navigate these choppy waters. They conclude that new, hope-giving possibilities are emerging.
You’ll learn about a fascinating group of caregivers who travel to trouble spots and train local residents in proven techniques that can help people to heal from trauma. In the lyrics of folksinger Carrie Newcomer: “there’s something holding steady and true, regardless of me and you.”
In this provocative Humankind program, we consider:
1) What resources are needed — for emotional and physical health and for the functioning of our communities?
2) What are ways out of thinking that, in all this commotion, we’re in a downward spiral, with no other options?
3) What simple self-care techniques can relieve the tensions now being felt my so many?

-- HumanKind Radio | Constant Emergency

Following are quick insightful impressions I gleaned while listening to the speakers:


Insights From Melissa Barnett

Each of us carry a full spectrum of emotions concerning our environment that range from love, fear, grief. And there is a lot of unmetabolized fear out there. My perception of the forest had changed after coming back from the fire. Instead of seeing quiet and green and calm, I saw fuel for fire resulting in panic. It was primal fear and hard to be there after the fire. After a catastrophe, isn’t having one’s faith shaken meant to do? Shouldn’t we re-think our patterns, our behaviors, or beliefs?”

“Working with children who came back after the fire, we did art, deep breathing, connection with animals, being outside and looking around their family and friends to see who is there to support them and thinking how they can help them.”

Peace begins with me.” — Say this as a mantra while you breathe

Melissa Barnett
yoga instructor Sonoma, California


Insights From James Gordon, MD

“Training people who are former caregivers (doctors, mental health workers) but also training teachers, preachers, household workers. First step is to shut up and focus on breathing, being here and now. This is a concentrative meditative exercise that calms down the flight or flight response. It lowers heart rate and blood pressure. It calms activity in the amygdala (responsible for violence) and places focus in Frontal Lobe (responsible for compassion, kindness). Deep breathing also activates cranial nerves (responsible for recognizing emotions in others) and frontal lobe come into function when we breathe slowly. When trauma is overwhelming, people go into freeze effect. People release neurotransmitters and disassociate from what is happened. It is a life saving response, but being constantly in freeze response it is deadly. We get people up and moving, maybe dancing, and something shifts inside. A man from Sarajevo who witnessed his entire family massacred after participating in Dr. Gordon’s deep breathing, relaxation, and dancing for the first time was not oppressed with visions of his family being killed.”

“To help people feel safe again in their lives requires hope, an internal shift that our lives can heal. Many people who have suffered trauma believe their is nothing they can do to change their lives. Trauma disables the healing aspects of our brains and minds.

James Gordon, MD
Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Washington, DC


Insights from Rev. Susan Beaumont

“For a vast majority of people living now there is a longing for simpler, easier, and more pleasant times. There are some eager to rush forward to resolution, but most want to turn back. There is a lost of hope. This is process of disintegrate of systems for new things to emerge. We have to live in this in-between place for the new thing to emerge. It is very hard to sit with Not Knowing. Lost of hope is biggest problem because we loss the ability to be creative in fixing what is wrong. In addition, there is a rush to restore the status quo. We have to remain unsettled so we keep creating, we keep innovating, but rather institute old practices as the New Normal (fueling the fire of collapse). For leaders finding the balance of feeling unstable and stable is very difficult.”

“New community needs to emphasize compassion and teach people how to sit with others and be present with each other in suffering without wrapping it up and putting a pretty bow on it. When people are in need, people benefit most simply from another person willing to listen and be present to the other person’s suffer and suffer it alongside of them… no solving, so strategy. We can be in it but not of it. We can surrender to the circumstances instead of rallying against them and then let it pass through us. A lot of our suffering comes from rallying against them.”

Rev. Susan Beaumont
Troy, Michigan


Insights From Nichole Warwick

“Grief is the BIG Elephant in the room. Not wanting to sit with our losses and our grief. Grieving is a sublet, multi-level process. Went through Al Gore’s Climate Change course, but after seeing so many images of devastation I was overwhelmed and grief struck but I couldn’t articulate it or see it in myself. So there was an element missing in the course for a long-time after I just couldn’t land what it was. A few weeks after the Climate Reality class, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and then I understood what was missing. We live in a culture ill-equipped to deal with grief. Our culture wants people to hurry up and get back to “normal”. With this diagnosis, I didn’t have a choice about my grief. With the tsunami of feelings and emotions, I had to take my time and process is it all.

“It takes courage to see the things we don’t want to see. It take courage to act and show love to people in pain, experiencing loss, or trauma. Look for ways you can help others and this grows your courage to endure your own pain and trauma.”

Nichole Warwick
Sonoma, CA Community Resilience Collaborative


Insights From Sabrina N’Diaye

“Something amazing always grows from bad experiences. There is this tree that grows in the middle of abandoned buildings and rubble. I have witness the darkness and I have witnessed the beauty that rises through it. Sit with yourself, be with all of your feelings and emotions, do not run away so you can be there to see the tree when it rises. When I think of all the people I admire, all of them had to walk through trauma. When I’m doing my work, it is to remember I am supposed to have the experiences to make me afraid, angry, frustrated, joy, love, and laughter… (all of this teaches me who I am.)”

“When feeling overwhelmed, I let myself cry when I hear another person’s story of pain and trauma. I give myself permission to feel what the person is feeling. Also, so many leaders of countries are hurting people. I cannot change the President of Russia, but I can change how I talk to my husband and my children and everyone around me and this changes the energy around us.

Sabrina N’Diaye
Psychotherapist, Baltimore, Maryland

Zen Bones: Being in the Way

The next road marker comes from one of my favorite philosopher-entertainers, Alan Watts. This is a podcast series hosted by Mark Watts, Alan Watt’s son. This one in particular is essential for understanding the beauty and value and necessity of uncertainty.

Alan Watts: Zen Bones – Being in the Way Podcast Ep. 5 – Hosted by Mark Watts | Be Here Now Network

To learn more about this podcast series, visit the Be Here Now Archives.

Passionless Activity

The third road makers comes from the Library of Consciousness (I love the name of this website-resource). I was looking for something Alan Watts said for my story, so I have highlighted nibbles from this transcript from one of his lectures.

To read the whole transcript in its entirety, go to DO YOU DO IT OR DOES IT DO YOU?


On Living By Rules

“To act without being motivated by the fruits of action, [this is the way to get out of the wheel of karma.]”

“So long as you’re looking for results—be they good or evil—you’re still bound [by the laws of karma].”

“The word dharma—sometimes meaning “the Buddhist’s doctrine,” or a certain way of life when you talk about a person’s svadharma—you mean “their own function.” We would translate svadharma as “vocation.” Sva is the same as the Latin sus: “one’s own.” Dharma: “function,” in this case. “Operation,” “way of life,” “style of life,” “profession,” “trade,” “role.” It means all those things. And the one thing that dharma really never means is “law,” although it’s often translated that way.”

“Because, you see, you don’t get the idea of law until you move to a culture where order is based on the idea of obedience. In the West, you see, the origins of law spring from where? The laws of the Medes and Persians, the Laws of Hammurabi, the Laws of Moses, and later Roman law. The only healthy legal tradition we have in the West is British common law, which proceeds in an entirely different way from code law.”

“Because, you see, the difference between code law and common law is that code law is laid down by the wisdom of an all-powerful ruler who tells everybody how they must behave, and they must obey him. But common law is evolved by discussion of particular cases rather than referring all the time to abstract principles which are put down in words. And the judge—the good judge—is a wise man, a man with a sense of equity and fair play who arbitrates an issue which is debated in front of him. And from the precedent from which he creates by his decision, common law evolves. You see, that’s a more organic way of producing law. The code law system, which we inherit from our most ancient theological backgrounds, is a tyrannical method of law by imposition.”

“And so you must understand that—in both Hinduism and Buddhism—there is really no fundamental idea of obedience to a personal ruler. Certainly not in Buddhism. A little bit, sometimes, in Hinduism. But even then we get terribly mixed up because, for example, I was talking of the Bhagavad Gita: this is often translated “The Lord’s Song.” Now, for Bhagavān (or Bhagavāt in Sanskrit) “Lord”—as an English equivalent—is quite inappropriate. Because a lord is one who lords it over you. Bhagavān is a title of reverence and respect and love. “The Song of the Beloved” would be much better, in a way—although it’s not quite correct from a strict point of view. We don’t really have an equivalent for this word, the Bhagavān.”

“So although, you see, there has been—in India itself—tyrannical rule, and although the Arthaśāstra (as a manual of politics) gives directions to a tyrant as to how to govern by absolute power, going along with this exposition of this very Machiavellian point of view to government is the constant advice of the sage: yes, this is what you have to do in order to fulfill your office as a ruler, but never forget that you’ll never succeed. The more you try to rule things by force, the more you will stir up violence against you. And so you can never hold on to your power and your possessions; it will always flow away from you.

On Living With Uncertainty

“So there was one of those great rajas of ancient India who asked a jeweler to make him a ring that would restrain him in prosperity and support him in adversity. And the jeweler wrote on the ring: “It will pass.” But when we come to the deep cosmological and metaphysical ideas, we don’t have law in the Western sense, and therefore nature is not looked upon as something which is an orderly system because it is obeying a commandment.”

On Backward Thinking

And we get into the same confusion when we imagine, for example, that money is wealth. Here we have fantastic wealth, you know, and we have the technological possibility of making everybody on Earth the enjoyer of an independent income. We can’t do it because people say, “Where’s the money going to come from?” Because they think money makes prosperity. It’s the other way around: it’s physical prosperity which has money as a way of measuring it. But people think money has to come from somewhere, like hydroelectric power or lumber or iron, and it doesn’t. Money is something we invent, like inches. So, you remember the Great Depression; when there was a slump? And what did we have a slump of? Money. There was no less wealth, no less energy, no less raw materials than there were before, but it’s like you came to work on building a house one day and they said, “Sorry, you can’t build this house today. No inches!” “What do you mean, no inches?” “Just inches! We got inches of lumber, yes. We got inches of metal. We’ve even got tape measures. But there’s a slump in inches as such,” you see? And people are that crazy! They can have a depression because they have no inches to go around, or no dollars. That’s all a lot of nonsense!”

There Are No Separate Events

“There are no separate events. This is startling to people. But it’s really quite easy to see that there are no events in nature, because you can ask very simply—let’s take something called an event: how do we demark it from other events? At what point, shall we say, were you born? Were you born at parturition? Or when the doctor slapped you on the bottom? Or cut the umbilical cord? Or when you were conceived? Or when your father and mother were first attracted to each other? When was it? When did you begin? There’s no way of deciding except arbitrarily. And for legal purposes we say you were born at parturition. And that’s when the astrologer casts your horoscope—except that other astrologers disagree and want the conception time, and say that’s the real beginning. There isn’t a real beginning. It goes back and back and back in an inseparable continuity. When are you dead? That’s another big argument. And you can get all kinds of ideas about that.”

Point-Instants Are Imaginary

“So once you see that an event is a term in an intellectual calculus—calculus being the way of measuring, say, curved formations by reducing them to point-instants and counting it, you see? But actually, the point-instants are imaginary. The curve wiggles along and it doesn’t stutter from point to point. But in calculus you make it do that. So just as there are no point-instants in the curve, so there are no events in nature. Nature is a constantly fluctuating pattern. You can only designate particular wiggles in a pattern arbitrarily. You can count a convex formation as one wiggle or a concave formation as one wiggle. Then you decide if you call it—if you give the convex properties the title of “wiggle,” you have to deny it to the concave properties, and vice versa.”

Have You Ever Watched A Snake Swim?

“When a snake swims, there’s nothing more beautiful than watching a snake swim in water. Lovely motion! But, you see, it wiggles along. And its wiggle is conceivable, you see, as convex—or was it concave? This way and that way and this way and that way. Now, which side of the snake moves first hen it wiggles? See, it’s very easy to see there.”

Now When the World Moves, What Starts First?

“Now, when we interact with the world, what moves first? Who starts it? The objective world or the subjective world? But they are related as this to that. You can’t have an object without a subject or a subject without an object. Can’t have something known without the knower. And that gives the show away. There isn’t any real distinction between the knower and the known. There’s two ways of looking at something, yes; two poles of a single process. But the knower and the known are subsumed as the knowing. And all life is knowing, being, becoming. And it isn’t something, in other words, that works by the idea of “all this happens because someone shoves it.”

What Is Karma–Really?

But if it’s your karma, everything that happens to you—put it in another way: everything that comes to you is a return to you of what goes out of you. Yes, obviously that’s absurd if you confine the definition of yourself to your voluntary, conscious behavior. That’s a ridiculous definition of one’s self. One’s self, by any stretch of the imagination, must involve far more than the conscious and voluntary aspects of our behavior. And if we see that it involves, intimately and inescapably, the behavior of what we call the “other,” the “not-self,” the “environment,” and see that these two are moving together like the two sides of the snake when it swims, then you get a very curious feeling. And you have to be careful of it if you’ve got a Western background.”

Holier-than-thou People

“Because this is what happens to a lot of people who play around with psychedelic chemicals. There are many, many cases of inflation among these people. That is to say, when you get this sensation that the two sides of the world—the inside and the outside—are moving together, you may think: “I am ruling it!” “I am God” in the Western sense of the word. Therefore, your ego—instead of being, as it were, integrated and transcended with all this process—merely assumes vast dimensions, has megalomania, is blown up by the mystical experience. And so you get the holier-than-thou people going around who seem to think that they’re above all human conventions and have no obligations to anyone or anything: because they’re divine, and they can do as they damn please.”

Choosing the Lesser of Two Evils

What they haven’t realized is that doing as you will isn’t a new kind of behavior that you suddenly put on and say, “From now on, I’m going to go around doing as I will.” You have to realize first that that’s what you’ve always been doing. And you could look at this from a very simple point of view—it’s not a complete point of view—but you can say: “Well now, what about the people who did good and who did the things that they didn’t want to do?” You know, everybody’s mother said to us, “Darling, sometimes we have to do thing we don’t like.” Well, what about that? Well, you can always say the kid obeyed the mother and did the thing that it didn’t like because that was the better part of wisdom. In other words, if he hadn’t done that, something worse would’ve happened. And we choose the lesser of two evils. And when you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose the lesser of two evils, then you say, “I want out of here!” and you take the easiest way; you take the line of least resistance. So that’s your doing.”

Praising and Blaming

““That’s not my fault, that’s your fault!” And so we go around apportioning faults to everybody. Because if we’re going to apportion praise the good things people do, you can’t make praise mean anything unless you also go around blaming. Praise and blame go together. Supposing everybody was acting in a praiseworthy way and we praised everybody for everything—they’ll get tired of it. They wouldn’t even notice it anymore. So, so long as you’re going to get a kick out of being praised, you’ve got to go around blaming, too. It’s very simple.”

Sermon on the Mount

And Ananda Coomaraswamy once described the life of the liberated being as a perpetual uncalculated life in the present. And you say, “Wow! I don’t think I could do that.” That saying of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount about “be not anxious for the morrow.” The uncalculated life. “If God so clothed the grass of the field, will he not much more clothe you, faithless ones?” And I’ve never met a preacher yet who would really take that up. They all say, “Well, of course, that’s too hard a saying for most of us. It’s not practical. Everybody has to take thought for the morrow and calculate.”

We Are Just Kids WithPlastic Steering Wheels

“Well, at this point people can go in two directions. There’s one class of people who will say, “Alright, let’s live the uncalculated life. Let’s not make any plans.” And before you know where they are they’re living in a filthy pad, and scrounging around, and living on petty thievery, and so on. This is the usual thing. This has got into it the wrong way. The first thing to do is just as I said: whether you like it or not and whether you know it or not, the relationship between you and the environment is always one that is harmonious. So, in the same way, you are always living the uncalculated life. And you have to find out, first of all, that you’re always doing it, and that what you call your calculations and the things you did were funny little rationalizations. In other words, your ego has about as much control over what goes on as a child sitting next to its father in a car with a plastic steering wheel that is turning the car the way daddy drives it. Because, as I pointed out, most of the functions, most of the goings-on in you, around you, the circumstances of life, have nothing to do with your ego at all. And you don’t even know why you make up your mind to do certain things. We know superficially; we have a few ideas.”

The Pretender — “It’s All Fake”

“So whenever you do a thing like that, you see, you make a forced change. Now, if the change is to happen in the same way that a seed (at proper season) breaks open and sends up a shoot, see, it comes from the whole force of life itself. Now, when you see that, without your having to do anything—see?—you are living the uncalculated life and you’re only pretending you’re calculating it and arranging it, then—as it were—you will have a grasp of the total situation. And you can allow it to produce changes in action which are not forced. So this is why there is always a trend in every kind of spiritual doctrine which says something about grace. Divine grace. There must come about something in you, a change, which you can’t produce. And if you try to produce it you will be a victim of spiritual pride. But on the other hand, all teachers at universities are saying, “You’ve got to make an effort.” There’s some discipline. There is something you must do. Well, that’s the only way to get it across to people that you, as a separate effort-maker, are a myth, are a phantasm. Because if you really try to control your mind and only think the thoughts that you think are good thoughts to think, you will find that you’re going ’round in a circle. Krishnamurti’s awfully good at pointing this out. When people ask him, “How do you meditate?” he says, “Why do you want to meditate?” “Why are you concentrating?” “Why are you saying prayers?” “Why do you think you should believe in God?” And it always comes up: “Because I’m just a son of a bitch. I’m out for my own good, and this seems to be the way.” So he says, “You see? You don’t have any genuine love at all. It’s all fake!”

“My Basis for Moral Behavior Is Pure Selfishness”

And so you have to find, first of all, where the genuine love is. Now, you love you, don’t you? That’s genuine. I won’t argue about that. But then, when you start from this—I gave a talk some time ago to the Air Force; their camp or lab where they make weapons, do all the research. And they got a bunch of us there who were ministers and philosophers, and they had the nerve to ask us: what was our basis for moral behavior; personal moral behavior? Well, I said, “My basis for moral behavior is pure selfishness. And I’m talking, after all, to realistic people here, and I don’t think we need be sentimental and beat about the bush. After all, you’re all warriors and fighters and so on, and you know how rough things are. So I’m going to say to you, frankly: I’m out for me. But, of course, I don’t do it in a tactless way. I don’t go around and hit people over the head and say, ‘Give me this’ and ‘Give me that.’ I’m much more subtle. I say good manners, and ‘please,’ and ‘how nice you all are,’ and so on, and finally people feel massaged, psychologically, into a state where they’ll give.” But then I said after that, “There’s some things that bother me. The first one is: if I love me, what do I want? And furthermore, who am I?”

I Cannot Experience Me Without You — To Love Another, Is to Love Myself

“Because if I’m going to be realistic about getting what I want, I’ve got to be pretty sure what it is that’s me, and what is the state of desire in me. If I am desire, you see, if I am a center of desire, what’s it all for? Well, I think of all the things I want. Well, it so turns out that none of them are me. I might say, “I want dinner.” Doesn’t mean I’m going to eat me up. Any pleasure I can think of is the enjoyment of something that I haven’t thought of defining as myself. Because I like my sensations, I like what happens to my body when I take a fine wine and down it. But then, what’s the difference between my body and the wine? If I say I like the wine, I also mean I like me and the wine together; the mixture. But then I don’t eat you, or a friend, or a lover, in the same way as I drink wine. I live in association and like this. But then I’m loving things that aren’t formally supposed to be me. And as I go into it—in other words, as I investigate what I mean by “me,” I find that I can’t put any limits on it; that I cannot experience “me” without “you,” or without the “other.” They’re inseparable. But you don’t find this out until you investigate it, until you really go into the question: “What do I want?” And that’s the most important investigation anyone can make (which I’m going into in the next session): the question of power. And all these military men, they think they want power. And so I said to them some very subversive and undermining things without anybody knowing it until long after I’d left!”

What Do You Desire?

“Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do? And when we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, “You do that, and forget the money.” Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living; that is, to go on living doing things you don’t like doing—which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way. And, after all, if you do really like what you’re doing—it doesn’t matter what it is—you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something: to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don’t worry too much. Somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you’ll find others who are. But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like, and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is: we’re bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living, in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to do the same thing. So it’s all retch and no vomit: it never gets there!”

What Do You REALLY Desire

“And so, therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: what do I desire? Well, when we answer that question in a naïve way, we figure out that what we want is to control everything: to create girls that don’t grow old, apples that don’t rot, clothes that never wear out, conveyances that get from one place to another instantly so we don’t have to wait, power available to do anything that you could conceive and do it just instantly; like that. To get this funny technological omnipotence. But if you take time out to think about that, and really go into it with your full strength of imagination and find out whether that’s where you want to be, you will soon see: that’s not what you want. Because the moment you have a situation where you are really in control of things—that is to say, in which the future is almost completely predictable—you will see, as I said last night, that a completely predictable future is already the past. You’ve had it. And that’s not what you wanted. You want a surprise. You don’t know what that’s going to be because, obviously, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you did. You want a pleasant surprise.”

Putin’s HELL… And All Other Tyrants Who Want to Control Everyone

“Imagine the situation of Big Brother: Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, Heinrich Himmler. To be glued, day and night, to a highly defended office with telephones, television screens, watching, peeking, spying on everyone and anything. Getting all this information together. Why, you could never leave the office! I mean, a character, I suppose, like J. Edgar Hoover goes home in the evening. But when he’s back home, you know, there are guards sitting outside the door, there’s that hotline telephone going to something. He’s always having to be in control. And he can’t take any time off, he can’t go for a walk in the park with a friend, or go innocently to the movies, or sit down and just relax and have an undistracted party in the baths at Big Sur. What a pauper this guy is! Completely deprived! Because he wants to be in control, because he wants power. People are frustrated in love; if you’re jilted. There’s a natural tendency in a human being to seek power as a substitute. And that’s a very negative thing. It’s like having a bad temper, to seek power after you’re frustrated in love. You should try and get back on the love beam. Because nobody wants power!”

Psychic Technology — Now That’s Power!

“Now then, when Oriental philosophy and religion was first introduced to the Western world, it was introduced under the auspices of people who were fascinated with power. It was introduced in the latter part of the 19th century, when we had heard all about evolution and how the human race was going on to ever greater heights, and we would eventually develop superman according to Nietzsche or G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. Remember all that early fantasy of where evolution would lead through the development of technology. And so, at this time, people like H. P. Blavatsky were talking about the mysterious wisdom of the East, and they phrased it, they commended it to us, in a technological spirit: that there was psychic technology, that there was something, that you could go way beyond anything that could be done through the physical sciences. You could cause your physical body to disintegrate to another level of vibration, and then transmit it and reassemble it somewhere else. You could live as long as you like because you control the fundamental processes. You could determine, if you decided to die, where you would be reborn, exactly. You would be a complete master of life. And so there are still innumerable books being sold which present Oriental philosophy and religion in this light. That charlatan, Lobsang Rampa, who writes about Tibetan mastery—people read that because they think that there may be a way of beating the game.”

Thinking Psycho-Technology All the Way Through to the End…

“So, therefore, the wise men of Asia were represented through this kind of propaganda as masters of life; as, for example, people whose emotions didn’t bother them, who could put up with any amount of pain by simply turning off their feelings, who could foretell the future, who could read your thoughts, and who were above all kinds of ordinary human frailty. Well, when I first met Buddhist priests, Zen masters, swamis, all these wise men from the East, one of the first things that impressed itself upon me was that they were perfectly ordinary human beings. They had bad tempers, they were fussy about certain things, they just acted as I would expect human beings to act. And so, at first, I was very disappointed. I thought they had feet of clay, but they didn’t come up to these promises of psycho-technology.

But after a while I got to realize why not: that they had already thought all that through. They had thought through what might be done if one had all these powers, and had decided that wasn’t what they wanted. The powers of this kind, in Sanskrit, are called siddhi. But there is hardly one decent scripture or text on yoga that does not say, again and again: if you get siddhi, ignore them. Go on to something else. These are only the foothills. These are, furthermore, not only foothills, but they are seductive, blind alleys. Won’t take you anywhere at all.”

Do You Really Want That Plastic Doll? That’s All?

Now, I think that this is the greatest possible lesson for the Western world to learn, because we are so hung up on the idea of power, of control, of being able to make everything go the right way, and we’ve never thought it through. When you get control of it, what are you going to do with it? Supposing I’m an alchemist and I have a whole secret closet full of love filters; very potent ones. And if I see a desirable woman, all I have to do is to offer her a cigarette or give her a glass of wine with one of my secret potions in it, and instantly I’m her master. Now, when I think that through, what would I do with a situation like that? Because all I’ve got, again, is that plastic doll that, when I push it, it does what I tell it to and doesn’t have any comeback. What you always are looking for in things is where the surprise is there, where there’s a comeback. And you say, “My god, this thing is alive! It has a will of its own. It is not in my control. And I would like to have a relationship with something like that, because it would never be dull.” And also, you would feel true affection. After all, you can make love to yourself in a mirror. You can have one of those Dutch wives; you buy them in a place in Kobe, where you get these rubber girls that you fill with hot water. And sailors take them on long voyages. But what an awful thing, you know, when you realize that this thing has no surprise in it, no thing that it does on its own, you see?”

Pursuit of Pure Pleasure Leads You to the Naraka Worlds

Because, you see, pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you into what the Buddhists call the naraka world; that is to say, to hells. When you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit, the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain. So naturally, you descend from the deva world at the top of the wheel to the naraka world at the bottom, where it shows all these beings in states of torture. Now, of course, the priests say—when they’re bringing up children—if you do bad things you will end up in the hell world. But this is a very inadequate way of showing how one gets to the hell world. You get to the hell world as a result of not knowing what you want, as a result of thoughtless pursuit of pleasure which ends you, eventually, in the pursuit of pain. So if you’re in the hell world, that’s where you want to be!”

What Do You Really, Really Want?

So then, we ask the question: if the motivation of power-gaining disappears—you’ve seen through it and you know that’s not what you want—what other motivation takes its place as the origin of actions? And it seems to me that the answer here is compassion. Simply because, when you want to relate to another living being, what you really are asking of them is that they be in the same situation that you are. You want to meet and encounter someone else who has your problems, your fears, and your delights. You don’t want a doll, you want another “you,” another “self,” because that would be at least as surprising to you as you are. And so, then, at once, when you see that that is the case, and that the most interesting thing in the world is the relationship with these others, and you can see at once yourself in the situation of all the other people, and then you think: no, I don’t want to control these people. I would like them—yes—to be controlled in the sense that they were happy to do the things I would like them to do. But obviously, I can’t force that. Because if I forced it, they wouldn’t be happy.”

This Is the Magic We Have Lost

“But there is, despite a lot of foolishness that goes on this, is a sound thing, you see? That there really is no greater satisfaction that you can imagine than that kind of personal relationship wherein you can trust a being who is other than you and not under your control to do for you what you want—because they like it. As you, on your side, would want to do something for them in that way, and so as to give pleasure to the other person. Just take, in sexuality, where you get a kind of a critical example of this: the biggest fun in sexual relationships is giving orgasm to women. And if that doesn’t happen, many men feel disappointed. Because a thing that they really wanted to do was to give pleasure and get their own pleasure out of giving it.”

Othering of the World

“So you see, it’s really, in a way, the same idea as the Hindu idea. When the Christian speaks of God giving the creature freedom of will, the Hindu says: no, God gets lost in that person and gives up power. And it’s really the same thing. It’s the idea that the all-powerful surrenders power. So that the more you give the power away, what you’re really doing is you’re “othering” yourself. Now, the more you “other” yourself by giving power away, the more of a “self” you are. Because “self” and “other” are reciprocal. So you find that people who, through a sādhanā (a yoga-discipline), have overcome their ego, have transcended the ego, are tremendously strong personalities. You would think, theoretically, they would all be non-entities and to lack entirely what psychologists call ego-strength. But actually, they’re nothing of the kind. They are—every one of them—unique. They’re all quite different from each other. And they are very, very (what I would call) strong characters. Because the more they have given it up, the more they get it.”

A Lovely Irresponsible State To Be In

So, in this way of thinking—let’s put it in another dimension for a moment. Let’s suppose we’re thinking of a relationship that is not just of people. People are very obviously other and independent of one’s ego. But give it to everything. Say to everything—which, of course, is going to include as much of yourself as you can objectify. In other words, your stomach, your intestines, your everything, you see? Say to it all: “Now it’s your turn. Let’s see what you’re going to do.” Let it happen. You know? You do this complete let-off of control. And you find that you—I have to put it in a provisional way first—you get the sensation that everything else is living you. It lives you. That you’ve given away control, you see, to everything else. It’s a lovely irresponsible state to be in.

Bllwp! In giving away the control, you got it.

But then, you see, you do the flip. Bllwp! In giving away the control, you got it. You’ve got the kind of control you wanted. That’s to say, where you had a loving relationship to the world but you didn’t have to make up your mind what it should do. You let it decide. Now, do you see: that’s how your bodies work. You don’t have to make up your mind what your nerve cells are going to do. You’ve delegated all that authority. If the president the United States has to lie awake at nights thinking what every official under his command is going to do, he can’t be president. He’s got to make an act of trust in all those subordinates to be responsible and carry on their things in just the same way as you make an act of trust to all your subordinate organs to carry on their functions without you having to tell them what to do. And this is the secret of what we will call organic power, as distinct from political power. Lao Tzu puts it in this way:

The great Tao flows everywhere,
Both to the left and to the right.
It loves and nourishes all things
But does not lord it over them.
And when merits are accomplished
It lays no claim to them.

— Lao Tzu

“Let’s see what you’re going to do.”

The more, therefore, you relinquish power—trust others—the more powerful you become. But in such a way that, instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything, you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else, and they carry it on for you. So you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning. You can even tell it: “I want to wake up at six o’clock,” and it will wake you up just like an alarm clock. This seems a sort of paradox to say this, but the principle of unity—of coming to a sense of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe—is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe. That will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever. The way to become one with the universe is to trust it as an other—as you would another—and say, “Let’s see what you’re going to do.” But in doing that, you see—in saying that to everything else (that you have been taught to think is not you), you are also saying it to yourself.”

All the segments above come from the Library of Consciousness assembled by Organism Earth. I stopped at 1:28:18.

History Is Over!

The final road marker comes from an episode from Throughline titled: History Is Over!

As the end of the 20th century approached, Radiohead took to the recording studio to capture the sound of a society that felt like it was fraying at the edges. Many people had high hopes for the new millennium, but for others a low hum of anxiety lurked just beneath the surface as the world changed rapidly and fears of a Y2K meltdown loomed.
Amidst all the unease, the famed British band began recording their highly anticipated follow ups to their career-changing album OK Computer. Those two albums, Kid A and Amnesiac, released in 2000 and 2001, were entrancing and eerie — they documented the struggle to redefine humanity, recalibrate, and get a grip on an uncertain world. In this episode, we travel back to the turn of the millennium with Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood and the music of Kid A and Amnesiac.

Kid A & Amnesiac

Radiohead: The Making Of “Kid A” And “Amnesiac” | Throughline

Soundbites from this episode of Throughline

 “It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” — SOUNDBITE OF FILM, “THE MATRIX” FISHBURNE: As Morpheus

All I’m offering is the truth | The Matrix [Open Matte]

“I’m not a bum. I’m a human being.” — SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1

The meet-up of Neo & Trinity | Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss | The Matrix Resurrections

  “What is internet anyway?” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3

unrecognizable hacker with smartphone typing on laptop at desk
Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels.com

“You know, progress is not necessarily a good thing. Our success was not necessarily a good thing…” — YORKE

photo of golden cogwheel on black background
Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels.com

“Into the next century, anxieties will increase.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6

woman sitting in front of macbook
Photo by energepic.com on Pexels.com

“Fire coming out from all over.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7

fire burn wallpaper
Photo by Emma Henry on Pexels.com

The risk of the virus expanding worldwide.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8

people wearing diy masks
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

New cold war.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9

an old soviet lun class ekranoplan on the ground
Photo by Ilya Sobolev on Pexels.com

A field of tears.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10

knitted hat lying among debris in ukrainian city
Photo by Алесь Усцінаў on Pexels.com

Sea level rise.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #11

high rise buildings
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Millions still struggling to be free.” — UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #12

shirtless black man fighting with ropes in studio
Photo by Ayodeji Fatunla on Pexels.com

There’s no question that we must feed the monster. Because the monster has already won. It’s like a movie, but you can’t stop it unless you wake up.” — YORKE

a model covered with paint looking fierce
Photo by imustbedead on Pexels.com

Florida is where WOKE goes to die.” — Ron DeSantis

underwater photography of woman
Photo by Engin Akyurt on Pexels.com

You need to name it… name the fear, the dread… and it will begin to diminish.” — YORKE

grayscale photo of woman peeking on planks
Photo by Rene Asmussen on Pexels.com

There’s always a sense of dread and a need to get beyond that fear so we can imagine and express a world that can look different than now.” — YORKE

traveler standing on stone monument in desert
Photo by Spencer Davis on Pexels.com

One Last Thing to Ponder on Uncertainty

What is the opposite of space element?

Neither. Space is best thought of as an empty vacuum, and the opposite of space is density. It doesn’t matter whether it’s earth, water, gas… anything collection of atoms starts to develop a gravitational field, pulling more atoms in as well as space.

AnonymousQuora
gray and black galaxy wallpaper
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

It really is quite spectacular that we are even alive at all. Perhaps, uncertainty is the rocket fuel that powers us into the unknown so we can know. And anyone who really pushes the limits and explores knows how much we need each other in this voyage… perhaps now more than ever before.

Feature Archetypal Animation

Image from: Graphics Nature Blue | uroburos |

Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

Painting Applied Painting Street Painting Image | uroburos | Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

Humanity Development Ripening Cosmos Science | uroburos | Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

Tiger Budgie Tiger Parakeet Photoshop Image Editing | SarahRichterArt | Sarah Richter  •  Deutsch  •  Member since Oct. 21, 2015

Dancers Dance Folk Dance Team Party | uroburos | Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

 Ellipsoid Graphics Mounting Element Graphic | uroburos | Bronisław Dróżka  •  Age 78  •  Nowy Sącz/Polska  •  Member since July 6, 2014

Unless….

What did the Lorax mean by Unless?

Image from: Are You a Lorax? | By  Jim Fitzpatrick – March 12, 2012 – Newport Beach Independent

This story had a deep and lasting impact on me. I was a child when it came out. I loved it the most of all the Dr. Seuss books. But it also troubled me. It felt very different from The Cat In the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, or Oh the Places You’ll Go.

It felt like a puzzle that needed to be solved and time was running out!

I felt that the one word the Lorax leaves behind for the greedy, old Once-ler was the key to solving the puzzle! But, what does it mean? Unless…what?!!

Dr. Seuss tells us what the Once-ler thinks Unless means at the end of the story. The Once-ler thinks that unless someone like the boy cares a whole lot, the world will never change.

It seems so simple. Surely, I felt as a child, there are bunches of children just like me reading this book and understand the message and will care enough. Surely, we the kids of the 70s get it, and when we grow up, we will change the world and avoid catastrophe.

But, we didn’t. Here we all are, 52 years later, and the world has not changed course. It remains fixed on the same course that it was on back in the 70s when Seuss first published The Lorax. In fact, it feels that we are all speeding ever faster… and to what? The End?

Clearly, the Lorax means something entirely different in his silent message he leave to the selfish, self-absorbed Once-ler. Clearly, Unless means something different than what the Once-ler thinks. But what? What do we need to do as humans to avert total disaster… perhaps even the end of the world as we know it now?

Quick Recap of The Lorax

Image from: ‘The Lorax’: A Campy And Whimsical Seussical | By David Edelstein – March 2, 2012 – Fresh Air

The young Once-ler arrives in the forest where the lovely Truffula Trees look like lollipops and the cute fuzzy Bar-ba-loots bears play alongside the beautiful Swomee-Swans birds and lovely humming fish!

Image from: Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax: Movie Adaption Information | By Carey Bryson — 3/17/17 — LiveAbout

But instead of seeing the incredible beauty all around him, the young Once-ler cuts down one of the incredible Truffula Trees and makes a Thneed!

What really?! A Thneed… this is the thing that everyone needs!

Dr. Seuss uses the Thneed as a symbol for the modern world’s obsession with fossil fuels. And Seuss is certainly right about this, gas-fuel-oil is truly something everyone needs in the world we have made.

There are lots of Once-lers in the modern world making millions and billions of dollars harvesting fossil fuels for all the things we need in our slick, fast-paced modern world!

Image from: ‘The Lorax’ review: Surgery was done on this Dr. Seuss | Published: Mar. 01, 2012 — OregonLive

The Lorax confronts the young Once-ler saying:

"I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
And I'm asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs" —
he was very upset as he shouted and puffed —
"What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?"
Image from: The Badness of The Lorax Is a Shock | by David Edelstein – MAR. 2, 2012 – Vulture

But the Once-ler does not hear the Lorax. Or rather he hears him but ignores him proclaiming he has a right to make money from the trees!

Image from: The Lorax | IMDb

The Lorax rallies all the animals and tries again to make the young Once-ler listen and understand.

Image from: It’s Seusstastic! How The Lorax Saved Hollywood | By Richard Corliss – 3/4/12 – Time

But there’s no stopping the happy young Once-ler. He cuts and chops and build a factory to make even more Thneeds! And then the Lorax is forced to come back and to tell him this:

'I'm the Lorax who speaks for the trees which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please. But I'm also in charge of the Brown Bar-ba-loots who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loots suits and happily lived, eating Truffula Fruits.'
Image from: the lorax | By Alison on June 18, 2011 – a tree grows in brookline and a teacher blogs about it

Nope, the Once-ler won’t listen. He builds an even bigger factory, and one even bigger than that one.

Images from: the lorax | By Alison on June 18, 2011 – a tree grows in brookline and a teacher blogs about it & Teaching Climate Change With The Lorax and The Jungle | By Mark Gozonsky on Getting High-School Kids to Read and Care About the Climate in Unconventional Ways — 10/21/19 — Literary Hub

Soon, the Lorax comes back with another dire message telling the Once-ler:

"Once-ler! You're making such smogulous smoke! My poor Swomee-Swans...why, they can't sing a note! No one can sing who has smog in his throat."
Image from: Final #PostABird fact for #BlackBirdersWeek Day 2. Do you know why the Lorax sends the Swomee-Swans away? Because there is too much smogulous smoke. | Twitter

The Once-ler shrugs and continues chopping down the beautiful Truffula Trees and making a Thneeds.

The Lorax returns again. Now it is the Humming-Fish who can no longer hum.

This time the Once-ler gets mad and shouts:

'Now listen here, Dad! All you do is yap-yap and say, 'Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!' Well, I have my rights sir, and I'm telling you I intend to go on doing just what I do! And, for your information, you Lorax, I'm figgering on biggering and biggering and biggering and biggering, turning MORE Truffual Trees into Thneeds which everyone, EVERYONE, EVERYONE needs!'
Image from: THE LORAX BY DR SEUSS | Stella & Rose’s Books

Not long after this the Lorax does the thing that sticks in my mind and haunts me to this day. He builds a small platform underneath the Once-ler’s factory, waits for the Once-ler to look out, then without a word, the Lorax picks up the seat of his pants and flies away disappearing through the last blue hole in the polluted, ugly sky… and that is thatUnless...

Image from: THE LORAX BY DR SEUSS | Stella & Rose’s Books

So What Did the Lorax Mean?

Dr. Suess says many years after the last Truffula Tree is chopped down, the now very old Once-ler thinks the word Unless means:

Image from: THE LORAX BY DR SEUSS | Stella & Rose’s Books

But, it hasn’t worked. Hope is not enough. To fix this mess, it take action.

Are We Even Capable of Changing Our Fate?

Do we really need to destroy our planet before we care enough about it to fix it?

I know, I know, the seed the Once-ler throws down to the boy is a symbol of hope and we all need hope to Do The Right Thing. But quite honestly, do we really know what the right thing is that we should be doing?

And nature will do just fine after humans are gone. Kind of like 2067, an Australian SciFi film, where that is exactly what happens.

2067 – Official Trailer
Starring: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Ryan Kwanten Writer/Director: Seth Larney By the year 2067, Earth has been ravaged by climate change and humanity is forced to live on artificial oxygen. An illness caused by the synthetic O2 is killing the worlds’ population and the only hope for a cure comes in the form of a message from the future: “Send Ethan Whyte”. Ethan, an underground tunnel worker, is suddenly thrust into a terrifying new world full of unknown danger as he must fight to save the human race.

I think the Lorax is telling us something else. I think the Lorax is warning us about ourselves and that Unless we learn how to let go of bad ideas, we are doomed to create the world we are speeding ever faster towards making. The one that will kill us.

What Is the Lorax Warning Us About Ourselves?

I think it is Shame; toxic shame to be specific.

Shame is an emotion of civilizations. We feel shame, and it is necessary to feel it. Feeling ashamed motivates us to improve ourselves. It motivates us to take care of the people around us, so that we to treat them with kindness, dignity, and respect.

No one wants to feel shame. Of all human emotions, shame is perhaps the hardest one to endure. Because of this, it is one of the scariest, most loathed, most feared emotion in our human tool box.

If shame had a color it would be the color of pee. Listen to Snap Judgement, and you’ll understand.

My Big Pee Break

Actress Diona Reasonover was on the brink of her big break. But she never expected it to happen while she was on her vacation.
Diona Reasonover is an actress who lives in LA, you can check out her writing on “I Love You America” with Sarah Silverman on Hulu.
Produced by Adizah Eghan

Note: Diona had a knee injury and could not make it to the bathroom on the plane before others beat her to it. Then, the plane begins to descend and the flight attendant not very understanding. So you’ll need to listen to how Diona solves her dilemma.

Bearing Witness

The episode before this one is worth a listen too: Date With The Devil. This one touches on the topic of how ee always hear about the people who survive a disaster and who often give credit Jesus or God for their good fortune, but we never hear about the people who made the exact same calculations, believe just as much in a higher power, but ended up dead.

I think we have become a bit lopsided in thinking about our survival as individuals and as a species when we hear only miraculous stories of good fortune, good luck, or good timing that allows a person to avert a tragedy.

But what about the people who don’t avert disaster? What about the people who get killed?

D. Parvaz touches on this in a very different story. It is a scary, tormented, horrifying, heart-wrenching story about people (through no fault of their own) do not make it. Indeed, they are murdered by monsters. That’s what humans become when they don’t digest and assimilate all of who they are as a human being. This means seeing the good in one’s self as well as the bad in one’s self. And yes, shame is one of those things.

People who refuse to feel their shame, fear, guilty, or whatever makes them uncomfortable will project them onto other people. People who don’t feel shame will do shameful things, horrendous things. They are no longer human because they have thrown half of who they are away.

So, don’t thrown your shame away! You need it. You really, really do… and the Lorax understood how desperately humans need to feel shame and other parts of themselves that make them truly capable of being human.

The Hidden Shame That Threatens Our World

This article is about toxic shame.

John Amodeo (a psychotherapist for over 40 years) describes that how not dealing with our feelings of shame there are far-reaching, destructive consequences.

He says, “When shame lurks outside of our awareness, it can become the driving force behind the destructive rage, blame, and violence that is damaging our world.”

Have you ever encountered someone who is boiling with a seething rage bubbling just under their human-looking skin but really what is lurking underneath is a monster ready to explode at the drop of a pin?

Consider the shootings this past week.

  • A teenage honor student who knocked on the wrong door was shot.
  • Cheerleaders who accidentally opened the wrong door of a car late at night are shot.
  • Teenagers who pulled into the wrong driveway and were turning around were shot, one died.
  • Children playing basketball and their ball rolls into a neighbors lawn are shot at, one father lost a lung after getting shot in the back.

Amodeo describes shame as the felt sense of being defective and inadequate: “it as an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

Shame has also been defined by Gerhsen Kaufman as a breaking of the interpersonal bridge. As human beings wired for connection, we dread isolation. Children fail to thrive when they don’t feel a safe and secure connection with caregivers. When healthy attachment is ruptured, a child feels unworthy of love and acceptance. This unbearable shame can lead to a mad scramble to prove our worth in distorted ways that often dehumanize others.
In a 2016 article, shame expert Bret Lyon, who leads Healing Shame trainings, describes how intolerable shame can be transferred to others:

“Driven by the need to keep the feelings of shame at bay and away from themselves, people can exult in their contempt and cynicism—finding a curious kind of gratification in it… In extreme cases, runaway contempt can cause people to lose sight of another’s humanity. Even their right to exist. This has led to extreme behavior, in Germany and many other places.”

The Hidden Shame That Threatens Our World

Amodeo drives home the point of toxic shame, the very same one that I think the Lorax is trying to drive home to us with his message Unless. Amodeo writes:

When the drive toward personal “success” or being superior becomes dissociated from our humanity, we seek gratification in ways that will never really satisfy us. We become disconnected from our souls, as our innate longing for love and connection curdles into a desire for status, money, or power. These substitute ways to seek gratification often spiral out of control—taking us on a perilous journey away from our fellow humans—and away from our true selves. This desire for a narrow self-gratification overlooks the reality that we are inescapably interconnected.
We can observe this shame-driven dynamic in our fraught politics, where looking good replaces being good (truly caring about others). We can see it in political and business leaders competing to amass the greatest wealth and power, which often translates into a race to see who can be the most contemptuous and divisive.
Some political leadersand followers who relish the thrill of belonging to a group that has special knowledge and that is superior to others—have so thoroughly dissociated from their vulnerability, their humanity, their hearts, and their souls, that they have no compunction to deny the rights of others, or, as we've seen in Ukraine and elsewhere, committing atrocities without any healthy shame to check their behavior.

The Big Choice

So… what are we going to do? Are we going to save our beautiful world full of life or are we all going to drown in a Yellow Sea of Seething Shame?

This is a job that requires every person on the planet to do. Every living individual needs to claim their shame and proclaim proudly: “I am human! I do stupid things! I learn from them! I become a better human because I use my shame to grow!”

Or, you can lock yourself inside a dilapidated husk of what used to be your humanity… deny your shame, cast it onto everyone else around you as you fake being a perfect human being.

But, your performance is nothing more than a rickety, glittery, shiny shell of who you used to be. Inside there is nothing to balance you out and make you human. You have become hollow; a garden hose flowing with seething shame disguised as rage.

On A Related Note

My college roommate from College of the Atlantic shared this story. It is closely related to the responsibility of each and every person to do the invisible work of sustaining and maintaining psychological as well as social health, which takes daily work.

Kicked out of the university lecture
Subject: Legal studies.
First lecture.
The professor enters the lecture hall.He looks around.
"You there in the 8th row. Can you tell me your name?" he asks a student.
"My name is Sandra" says a voice.
The professor asks her, "Please leave my lecture hall. I don't want to see you in my lecture."
Everyone is quiet. The student is irritated, slowly packs her things and stands up.
"Faster please" she is asked.
She doesn't dare to say anything and leaves the lecture hall.
The professor keeps looking around.
The participants are scared.
"Why are there laws?" he asks the group.
All quiet. Everyone looks at the others.
"What are laws for?" he asks again.
"Social order" is heard from a row
A student says "To protect a person's personal rights."
Another says "So that you can rely on the state."
The professor is not satisfied.
"Justice" calls out a student.
The professor smiling. She has his attention.
"Thank you very much. Did I behave unfairly towards your classmate earlier?"
Everyone nods.
"Indeed I did. Why didn't anyone protest?
Why didn't any of you try to stop me?
Why didn't you want to prevent this injustice?" he asks.
Nobody answers.
"What you just learned you wouldn't have understood in 1,000 hours of lectures if you hadn't lived it. You didn't say anything just because you weren't affected yourself. This attitude speaks against you and against life. You think as long as it doesn't concern you, it's none of your business. I'm telling you, if you don't say anything today and don't bring about justice, then one day you too will experience injustice and no one will stand before you. Justice lives through us all. We have to fight for it."
“In life and at work, we often live next to each other instead of with each other. We console ourselves that the problems of others are none of our business. We go home and are glad that we were spared. But it's also about standing up for others. Every day an injustice happens in business, in sports or on the tram. Relying on someone to sort it out is not enough. It is our duty to be there for others. Speaking for others when they cannot.”
                                      -- Shared by Liza Hall -- 12/4/22

Feature Archetypal Animation

Music: How Bad Can I Be (From “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax”) — Geek Music

UFOs No…But Unexplained Inner Phenomena, Yes!

Who doesn’t like UFOs?!

Think Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (2/8) Movie CLIP – Chasing the UFOs (1977) HD
261,453 views, Oct 7, 2012

Or ET:

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (2/10) Movie CLIP – Getting Drunk (1982) HD
4,391,816 views, May 27, 2011

But Are They Real?

David Kestenbaum of This American Life says: U-F-No!

Not long ago, in an extremely rare moment of bipartisan unity, Republicans and Democrats came together to discuss UFOs, now called unexplained aerial phenomena or UAPs by the military. It is the first Congressional meeting on the topic since 1969.

Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence Scott Bray, left, and Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security Ronald Moultrie speak Tuesday during a House Intelligence, Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee hearing on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” on Capitol Hill in Washington. Alex Brandon/AP — Image from NPR Report on Congress UFO Hearing

David listened into the hearing along with Mick West.

Mick West is a British science writer, skeptical investigator, and retired video game programmer. He is the creator of the websites Contrail Science and Metabunk, and he investigates and debunks pseudoscientific claims and conspiracy theories such as chemtrails and UFOs. Wikipedia

This short episode of This American Life is a curation of their discussion of the Congressional Hearing while they listened to military officials present a report to Congress that includes about 400 incidents, which is up from 143 assessed in a report released about a year ago.

Mick explained a lot of the unexplained aerial phenomena as camera artifacts such as these:

Scott W. Bray, the deputy director of Naval intelligence, told lawmakers there is no evidence of aliens, and they still haven’t uncovered anything “nonterrestrial in origin,” although there remain incidents they can’t explain.

That Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Real

Despite lacking physical evidence that proves the reality of UFOs (other than other explanations such as camera artifacts, mylar balloons, and contrails) that does not mean there isn’t something very real going on. Indeed, this unexplained phenomena is as old as man’s ability to articulate his experiences to others. What makes humans extraordinary on this planet is our shared ability to perceive and share physical reality through words, symbols, and ideas. Human beings also share the ability to perceive and make sense of inner realities. Indeed, mankind’s most spectacular ideas and inventions originate from this inner dimension of being.

Carl Jung is best known for his theories of the human subconscious and the idea he termed the Collective Unconscious. Through his practice as a psychiatrist, he came to believe humanity shares a subconscious mind that stores the memories of all human beings, dead and alive, that are available to us through images, visions, dreams, and other phenomena humans experience, especially at times of stress, trauma, life and death.

The notion of collective consciousness was put forward by Carl Gustav Jung (Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock) — Image from: Carl Jung and the Concept of Collective Consciousness

Jung wrote a book about UFO and paranormal phenomenon. Here are two summaries of this book:

While Jung is known mainly for his theories on the nature of the unconscious mind, he did have an interest in the paranormal. In this essay, Jung applies his analytical skills to the UFO phenomenon. Rather than assuming that the modern prevalence of UFO sightings are due to extraterrestrial craft, Jung reserves judgment on their origin & connects UFOs with archetypal imagery, concluding that they have become a "living myth." This essay is intriguing in its methodology & implications as to the nature of UFOs & their relation to the human psyche. -- GoodReads: Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies

In the threatening situation of the world today, when people are beginning to see that everything is at stake, the projection-creating fantasy soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets.... Even people who would never have thought that a religious problem could be a serious matter that concerned them personally are beginning to ask themselves fundamental questions. Under these circumstances it would not be at all surprising if those sections of the community who ask themselves nothing were visited by `visions,' by a widespread myth seriously believed in by some and rejected as absurd by others.--C. G. Jung, in Flying Saucers Jung's primary concern in Flying Saucers is not with the reality or unreality of UFOs but with their psychic aspect. Rather than speculate about their possible nature and extraterrestrial origin as alleged spacecraft, he asks what it may signify that these phenomena, whether real or imagined, are seen in such numbers just at a time when humankind is menaced as never before in history. The UFOs represent, in Jung's phrase, a modern myth. -- GoogleBooks Summary

Jung maintained throughout his life that man’s inner life, dreams, images, visions is real and carries a reality, a gravity that can be felt in our lives each and every day.

Sources for Images Above: Myth CraftsCarl Jung and UFOs: Ancient Alien Art – Myth Crafts; Brill[PDF] Judaism and the UFO; with Emphasis on the Vision of Ezekiel; Cambridge University PressTrauma, flying saucers and the art of Ionel Talpazan | Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences | Cambridge Core; Saatchi ArtUFO 0361, 2019, mixed media on canvas, 40x50cm Painting by Marc Jung | Saatchi Art; GoodreadsOwlseyes (O’Porto, Portugal)’s review of Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies; Princeton University PressFlying Saucers | Princeton University Press

Reality Is Strange | We Need Inner Astronauts Now More Than Ever

Perhaps we need more inner astronauts willing and able to go where no man has gone before, equipped with abilities to chart our inner space, just as we do our outer space. Indeed, inner space may be far vaster than the universe, which may be a little phenomena of this vast inner space that we do not understand very much at all.

In a time of so much crisis, we need to learn how to better articulate inner weather and dangerous patterns just as we have learned to watch and predict weather patterns and identify dangerous patterns such as Hurricane Ian.

There have been many dangerous and horrible natural disasters this year, including devastating floods in Pakistan, acute heat waves and historically lower water levels in rivers throughout Europe, and increasingly bigger and deadlier fires worldwide (see 2022 International Wildfires: As of Sept. 8, the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) estimates that within European Union countries, between 2 million acres and 2.1 million acres have burned).

There is also dangerous and deadly inner weather that is sweeping the world. It travels on currents of propaganda, misinformation, lies, and conspiracy myths. Hurricane Putin is meaning the entire world with his threats of nukes, sabotaging his own pipeline (a play he used to get into power when he had apartment buildings blown up and blamed it on Chechen separatists), and the death, destruction, and torture of Ukrainians. His maniacal invasion of Ukraine rides on his strangle hold on power in Russia allowing him to infect and propagate a collective homicidal psychosis among his people. His and other strong arm actors in our world are distracting us and contributing to our collective failure to mitigate climate change while we still can.

Can you tell which pictures that are Putin’s hurricane of devastation and death and which are Ian?

Images above from: Sky NewsUkraine war: Images taken by Sky News team reveal devastating aftermath of war | World News | Sky News; Tampa Bay TimesAbsolute devastation’: Hurricane Ian decimates Fort Myers Beach; ABC NewsWhat’s the cost of damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure amid Russia’s invasion? – ABC NewsVisit; The Sun DailyRescue efforts continue as Florida takes stock of Hurricane Ian devastation; BBCUkraine war: Images reveal scale of destruction in Mariupol – BBC News; The News-PressAerial video shows devastation on Fort Myers Beach after Hurricane IanWatch… on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022; USNews.comRussian Carnage, Destruction Revealed in Newly Liberated Ukrainian Territory; southernminn.comIan lashes South Carolina as Florida surveys devastation | State | southernminn.com; University of Nevada, RenoUkraine, horror of the past, terror to the future | University of Nevada, Ren; Charisma NewsSharks in the Streets, Houses Floating Away as Ian Leaves Mass Devastation — Charisma NewsVisit; Common DreamsCivilians ‘Paying the Highest Price’ for ‘Utter Devastation’ of Ukraine: UN Official; Independent.ieIn pictures: Hurricane Ian causes devastation as it swamps parts of Florida – Independent.ie

Charting A New Future

I think Future Islands nailed the idea of unidentified phenomena, either being external or internal, in their beautiful song Like the Moon:

Future Islands – Like the Moon
6,667,533 views

Without better abilities to navigate our inner spaces, we will probably destroy our planet and ourselves right along with it.

First Archetypal Image

Child Road Spaceship Photomontage Ufo Kid Girl | warppppp5 | Waschi Washborne  •  Age 60  •  Essen/Germany  •  Member since Dec. 15, 2020

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Earth Ufo World Globe Landscape Country Template | pixel2013 | S. Hermann / F. Richter  •  Germany  •  Member since April 9, 2016

Music for Archetypal Animation:

Uncharted History | Sound Effects Zone

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If It Was My Last Day on Earth?

What would you do if this was your last day on Earth today?

Perhaps write a poem?

It is our perception of reality that determines so much of what we allow ourselves to accept or not accept, what we allow ourselves to believe or not believe, how much we allow ourselves to love or not to love.

Poems are wonderful transformers of perception.

Here are some poems about nature, Earth, and life that have been written at very different periods in time, and yet, there is something universal, something incredibly current, something worth paying attention to in each and every one of them, especially today.


A Minor Bird by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

I have wished a bird would fly away,

And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door

When it seemed as if I could bear no more..

The fault must partly have been in me.

The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong

In wanting to silence any song.

From 7 Poems To Read In Honor Of Earth Day, Bustle, By E. Ce Miller, April 14, 2016

“I have wished a bird would fly away… and not sing all day…” | Music: A Minor Bird by Victoria Darian

Ryokan (1758-1831)

When all thoughts
Are exhausted
I slip into the woods
And gather
A pile of shepherd’s purse.

From Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf:  Zen Poems of Ryokan, translated by John Stevens. Published by Shambala in Boston, 1996.


Basho (1644-1694)

Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die.


The bee emerging
from deep within the peony
departs reluctantly.


Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreams.

From The Essential Basho, Translated by Sam Hamill.  Published by Shambala in Boston, 1999.

“Nothing in the cry
of cicadas suggests they
are about to die…”

Music: When Dragons Cry by Bo Johnson

Ikkyu (1394-1481)

My Hovel

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted, just like me.
The earth is decrepit, the sky stormy, all the grass withered.
No spring breeze even at this late date,
Just winter clouds swallowing up my tiny reed hut.

From Wild Ways: Zen Poems of Ikkyu, translated by John Stevens. Published by Shambala in Boston, 1995.

The world before my eyes is wan and wasted, just like me… | Music: Time Travelers Coyote Oldman [4] The Fourth Dream    5:26

These Zen poems come from A Sampler of Zen Poetry. The author of this sampler says, “These are a few of my favorite poems by three of Japan’s greatest Zen monk-poets, Ikkyu (1394-1481), Basho (1644-1694), and Ryokan (1758-1831).”

They are indeed very beautiful and holy.


Today is Earth Day!

Go ahead, write a poem! Transcend space and time and perceptions of reality using nothing but your mind.

We never know when our last day on Earth will be.

Seize the moment, see more, feel your rightness in this moment, know you belong and you matter, right here, right now. You are it!

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Music:

Music: A Minor Bird by Victoria Darian [1] A Minor Bird    5:08


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Music: When Dragons Cry by Bo Johnson [1] When Dragons Cry    4:32


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Music: Time Travelers Coyote Oldman [1] Time Travelers    8:04[2] Dark Beauty    5:07[3] Peaceful Blue    4:09 [4] The Fourth Dream    5:26

After Math — The Magical Calculus of Consciousness

Here & Now

Arcade Fire – Afterlife (Official Video)

Recently, I had an astonishing conversation with a friend on Facebook. I consider it remarkable because so much of what transpires on Facebook (and all other social media platforms) is mindless. This is because that’s what Facebook peddles: distraction. Such platforms are the perfect place to project our deepest fantasies, dreams, desires, and distortions onto other people who have been reduced to simple icons or avatars. Instead of being ordinary people with complicated lives and good and bad qualities, just like ourselves, other people get turned into containers that we fill with our own undigested consciousness and more often with our unconsciousness–projections of ourselves temporarily lost onto others who inhabit the thing about ourself that we have not been able to accept or see inside ourself yet.

What woke me up in this exchange was something Barry said about the TV series Once Upon a Time (love the part in this sneak peak of this series where Snow asks ‘Where are we going?’ and the Evil Queen says ‘Somewhere horrible’ and laughs… doesn’t that sound like reality now?!). I had watched this series and enjoyed it. He had watched and observed something profound:

“Getting back to the remarkable dramaturgy in “Once Upon a Time,” I’m currently up to Season 5, where the main characters of Storybrooke pay a visit to the mythical Underworld, where they encounter a number of other incidental characters who have “Unfinished Business” which they need to resolve before going on to the “Better Place” or to the “Other Place” in the AfterLife. AfterLife is a term of art from Theology, but compare it to Aftermath (which should be written AfterMath). The “Math” is a reference to the individual calculating how they are going to handle a crisis in their life. The characters routinely argue over devising the best or most practical solution to the immediate crisis or dilemma.What happens throughout the series (but especially in the Underworld) is that the viewer at home learns key information about some character’s previously undisclosed Backstory and their associated Unresolved Burning Issues. How the characters eventually process it is often quite stark. Do they choose the unwise path of revenge (and thereby lose their “Happy Ending”) or do they choose the more saintly path of mercy, forgiveness, and healing.What astonished me is how beautifully this ABC-TV series illuminates the Storybook Character Model that I wrote up two decades ago within the scope of our NSF-funded research project at the MIT Media Lab. Click here for the narrative that attends this slide.”

Barry Kort
All credit to my friend Barry Kort who provided this in a comment on an ordinary post made November 3 at 7:58 AM  · 

This stopped me in my mindless tracks, since being mindless on Facebook is something I have learned how to do as a survival skill on this platform. I am exaggerating this a bit since I had several other meaningful exchanges on this post, but meaningful exchanges are rare on Facebook and most don’t last long.

Before I became a mindless user of Facebook, I use to bring my full attention into groups and conversations on Facebook because I thought there could be meaningful exchanges that could occur in this virtual space. But I quickly learned the constant flow of chatter drowned out pretty much anything meaningful transpiring there, sweeping it into the Sea of Forgettable & Forgotten Thought only to pop up again (almost word for word) in another group by someone else or on someone else’s timeline.

It is not plagiarism; it is only what the Sea of Forgetting does to all of us and it happens by design because our thoughts, behaviors, needs, and desires are being cultivated and harvested by these platforms for the good of others, not ourselves. So we are manipulated into thinking we are having a valuable exchange or conversation with another human being, but this is an illusion unless you bring your consciousness into the process, which most of the time, you will be punished for doing… so most people stop trying.

This is when we become most vulnerable to being herded by the algorithms, which constantly shift our NewsFeeds and point our attention here and there: all for the good of those who own the platforms (or who do business with them: the exchange of money). And like this, we become nothing more than Parrots of the Algorithms.

What do I mean by that?

Facebook knows basically at our primal core, we are herd animals. This means we can be herded and shepherded in very predictable ways. A lot like these sheep being herded and directed by sheep herders and well-trained sheep dogs to create the Mona Lisa with LED lights! Really, watch it…you’ll enjoy it.

Extreme Sheep Herding LED Art — Oct 19, 2012

On the Facebook platform, what is being herded is our time and attention— sent to places that are advantageous to the builders of the platform and the Captains of Commerce they are courting. When I say places, I also mean places in our mind: states of feeling, states of emoting, states of being; all these mental states affect us and inform our actions in the world (which of course is what Facebook and algorithms understand). And so the algorithms watch our every action. They even anticipate them like smart, bullish sheep dogs. And, they redirect us if we try to buck the system we are flowing inside by using the platform that has been created for us. Any undesired action or change of direction or new pattern–something that might wake us up, perhaps like genuine friendship and conversation–gets redirected (e.g., shut down, stops showing up in your NewsFeed, stops showing up in your friend’s NewsFeed).

I know about bullish sheep dogs. I have a Great Pyrenees-Pitt Bull puppy who can be very stubborn in getting me to do what she wants me to do, rather than what I want to do. After trying to use Facebook to cultivate generative conversations and reciprocal relationships (like friendships in the normal, real world work), I gave up after learning some hard and disappointing lessons.

  • I learned the more I chased after generative conversations on Facebook, the faster they dissolved and flowed somewhere else. It was like a bad episode in the land of Storybrooke where everyone suddenly forgets who they are and begins repeating the same mistakes that will lead to the same horrible outcomes, just as the evil Queen promises in the clip above.
  • I learned when most individuals sent me a friend request, they weren’t at all interested in being my friend. They simply were seeking a new follower for themselves because they had a carved out a wonderful space in their tiny corner of Storybrooke being played out all over the world on Facebook (and this includes any other social media platform one engages). In fact, I soon found out that it is virtually impossible to be a real friend on Facebook because the algorithms are constantly cutting us off from each other and directing us into community pools where intrigue, outrage, and wholly forgetting experiences are transpiring and repeating over and over again, basically the same mistakes occurring again and again for the good of a few.
  • I learned everybody wants to save the world on Facebook, and each individual believes they are the savior who has found the One and Only Solution, which makes them more of ruler, doesn’t it? You join their group and post something they don’t understand or don’t agree with and it gets quickly deleted or it doesn’t get approved or the worst Fate Ever on Facebook--it gets ignored.
Tears For Fears – Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Official Music Video) — [I love this group so much! They are definitely a favorite of my Last DJ of Earth character!!]

And so, I learned to bring my unconscious attention to Facebook because that is what Facebook traffics: unconsciousness and this is because it is always exciting and a little bit dangerous. But isn’t that why we go there? Because we are seeking the unexpected, a surprise, something to help us escape?

Escape what‘, you may ask?

Reality, of course. We, the Good People of Earth, have been reduced into beings who constantly seek escape from the extremely boring social containers we are forced to exist inside. We do this because that is the price of gaining the luxurious privileges of living inside the container of a modern Westernized civilization. But, of course, these privileges are not equal or fair for everyone. They simply appear to be fair, but it is an illusion cultivated by the system to maintain extreme imbalances baked into the system long ago.

I don’t think it is anyone’s fault for playing by the extremely unfair rules we were born to play. The system perpetuates these roles for it has been designed over thousands of years to keep us unconscious and divided because this way we are more easily herded like sheep for the good of the system. To not fall into the Pit of Greed designed into the system requires a feat of conscious growth that is definitely not encouraged and even actively discouraged because that would be dangerous for the well-being of system.

So, when Barry Kort said the above, I woke up, and then he added: “If there is one thing that guides my relentless and idiosyncratic drive to craft fundamental theories about the observable behavior patterns of our species and our culture, it’s the drive to Bear Accurate Witness. In “Once Upon a Time,” when Henry becomes the Author, that’s his guiding principle too.”

I asked him to comment more on Bearing Accurate Witness, saying: “Can you say more on the Drive to Bear Accurate Witness?I am pulling this over finally after a very distracting weekend 😉 … but I am bending my mind back to the task at hand. What you are saying is so utterly important in this Now.I am borrowing your brilliant insight AfterMath to title this resource page. I’ve added a tag — The Magical Calculus of Consciousness.Bear Accurate Witness is so important… could this be a baby Archetype forming inside the collective human sea of consciousness… one essential to take root and grow for us as a species to survive what is coming next? This election was very interesting, but we’ve just begun this struggle…”


When/if Barry responds, I will add his comments here, but the idea of Bearing Accurate Witness is extremely pertinent to the exponential rise of relative realities being projected into the world by the species Homo sapiens sapiens.

He answered: “There are three or four places where I dove into the concept of Bearing Accurate Witness.1. The stricture against bearing false witness is enshrined in the Ten Commandments.2. When I was in Grad School, studying arcane topics like Cybernetic Systems Theory and Feedback Control Theory, we came to the Fundamental Theorem of Feedback Control Theory. One-half of that theorem spelled out the requirement of reliably observing the current state, so that it can be compared against the goal state to determine the present amount of deviation. That deviation then drove the second phase, which was to compute the amount of adjustment to the controls to drive the deviation to zero as smoothly as possible. If you cannot reliably observe and report the current state, then you do not have a functional feedback control loop.3. Among the introductions Zen that one could find in an American bookstore was one by Bernie Glassman entitled, “Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace.”4. In Judaism, the affirmation of One God (the “Shema”) is recited multiple times in weekly services. But this affirmation appears exactly once (in Hebrew) in the Torah scroll and it exactly fits on one line. In the calligraphy, the last letter of ‘Shema’ (the Ayin) is written in oversize lettering, and the last letter of the last word (Daled) is also written in oversize lettering. These two Hebrew letters, together form a two-letter Hebrew word that means “Witness.” When I told this story to a class, one of them created this drawing for me.”

— Barry Kort
Image provided by Barry Kort

He also provided two other pieces he has written that are also extremely profound and worth your time and attention.

The Ninth Intelligence by Barry Kort — September 6, 2013

Moulton Lava — Solving for the BackStory

Moulton Lava — Moultonic Musings — aka Barry Kort — Solving for the BackStory — THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2005

Now, I will boldly ramble on… thus, Now is a probably a good time to skim what follows.

Projecting consciousness is not a new ability. Humans have been doing this ever since crossing the Threshold of Consciousness. I talk about this in my story and have imagined what it must have been like for the first human to cross the Threshold of Consciousness bring the entire species into they type of consciousness we know and understand today. It was not always like this. Consciousness has taken many, many channels of bing to get to us.

I will not say more about this now other than to provide a simple metaphor illustrating our ability to project consciousness. It is very much like what our sun does in emitting light. Mostly, this is a good thing…after all, there would not be life as we know it on Earth without it. However, sometimes huge coronal mass ejections occur releasing dangerous amounts of plasma and its accompanying magnetic field, which roar from the sun like a hot solar wind. These flares can be very destructive to the fragile life forms clinging to the surfaces of surrounding planets like Earth. Indeed, some theories speculate it was exactly such a devastation that befell Mars, causing its fragile life forms to disappear.


The Netflix series Away explores this idea in a deep and gritty drama that feels terribly real as the first humans to venture to Mars in order to set up the first base station there (and perhaps reintroduce life!). The series explores deep and complex realities of living in space alongside even more complex complications of cherished relationships left behind on Earth. As the first astronauts travel farther and farther from home, the vast distance and time delays threaten to collapse fragile bonds of the loved ones being tested and strained by circumstances beyond their control. And of course, some of these circumstances cannot be fully calculated by us, fragile human lifeforms, bolding exploring our home solar systems. Definitely worth watching!

Away | Official Trailer | Netflix | Aug 10, 2020

This video is a NASA animation of a Coronal Mass Ejection from our Sun.

NASA | Magnificent Eruption | coronal mass ejection | in Full HD | Sep 5, 2012

And this Alan Watts video about consciousness (as I begin to transcribe this video, I am bulled over that Watts begins this lecture by saying human evolved a system of self-consciousness…I had not paid attention to this as I wrote my musing above):

Alan Watts | The Cosmic Masochis |Posted Nov 14, 2020 by Haunted By The TruthWithout thought of white there is no black, without self there is no other, without life there is no death.

Partial Transcript of Alan Watts’ Lecture:

00:01: Several thousand years ago, human beings evolved the system of self-consciousness.

00:10: And, they knew that they knew: “There was a young man who said though it seems that I know that I know; what I would like to see is the I/eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

00:24: You see, and this is the human problem: We know that we know, and so there came a point in our evolution when we didn’t guide life by just trusting our instincts and had to think about it and had to purposely arrange and discipline and push our lives around in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols accountancy calculation and so on. And then, we worry once you start thinking about things you worry as to whether you’ve thought enough.

1:03: Did you really take all the details into consideration? Was every fact properly reviewed? And by jove, the more you think about it the more you realize that you really couldn’t take everything into consideration because all the variables in any human decision are incalculable.

1:22: So you get anxiety. This though also this is the price you pay for knowing that you know, for being able to think about thinking to feel about feeling, and so you’re in this funny position.


I will not wax and wane about our ability of consciousness and how it has allowed us to warp reality because I write about this in great detail in my story about Climate Change and Consciousness. Rather, I will simply highlight a few other moments that have captured my attention and inform my thinking on this usually, very abstract, but also very old idea.

Shape of Stories

Kurt Vonnegut, Shape of Stories (subtitulos castellano)

I love how this clip starts: “Now…where the hell are we?

Doesn’t that about sum up reality, especially these days in the Year of Our Lord 2020 with a raging global pandemic right after a highly contentious US presidential election called a clear winner but the loser refuses to accept reality.

Now, why do I start out this resource list with this timeless clip about the Shape of Stories by Kurt Vonnegut?

Because stories are how we have learned to collect, consolidate, and direct consciousness to do things in the world. We use stories to do this be it an individual consolidating his or her consciousness to do something in the world or a state, a nation, or a civilization consolidating all its individual streams of consciousness into a powerful river of consciousness to do something bold and daring in the world.

Kurt Vonnegut, Shape of Stories — This is a cheat sheet of the main story arches we love to tell as humans, but listen to the whole lecture because a critical story arch is missing from this list. [Image gotten from The Shape of Stories — Broadsheet]

Current Events Informing the Shape of Humanity’s Current Reality — Our Collective Calculus of Consciousness & Story

I want to spend a little time on current events in America because they have an outsized role in shaping and determining many other stories unfolding inside the United States as well as around the world.


The first and most profound, probably the event that will gleam loudly in history books around the world like a glaring code red alarm, is Donald Trump’s catastrophic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. From the very beginning, he chose the path of ignorance, denial, rapacity, and blatant disregard for human life. He did this because he wanted to place the health and wellbeing of the economy (specifically the part that benefited him and his despicable, greedy friends) over the lives of the people of the United States of America. It is a crime against humanity, and one day, an accurate witness of this terrible reality will need to be borne by all of the members of this society–our collective: the United States of America. But for now, Donald Trump continues to muddy the waters of our collective consciousness with more lies, fresh deceit, copious bluffs and endless confidence tricks. His efforts are so vast and so endless, the good people of this country have been worn down and worn out. This has made all of us vulnerable to being swindled out of our goodwill, our commonsense, our intelligence, and most of all, our inner moral compass. Once depleted of these intangible, but infinitely powerful parts of any individual’s consciousness, we, the people, have been cruelly cast adrift on a savage sea of unconsciousness. Donald Trump did not create this sea. We, the people, created it by turning away from the truth in our exhaustion. But he is using it to pound away at the foundations of our fragile democracy. His endless subterfuge will take years, perhaps decades (even centuries), to repair the memory banks that contain the collective psyche of our great country, which guides and informs every individual living inside this system of consciousness we call the United States of America. This is because too many individuals will continue to believe Donald Trump’s lies long after this man of deception, artifice, and divisive duping is dead.

This article in The Atlantic beautifully articulates the damage he has done in 4 percious, short years of his reign of flimflam wiling of the American people. We are paying the price of reality, not him. That’s what the twisted rich do with their power. They thrown other people under the bus of reality for their bad calculations of consciousness forestalling their own awful fate for a little longer… but not forever. In the end, fate always catches up and swallows its guilty, gullible victims of ignorance who never bother to grow their individual field of consciousness.


Trump’s Indifference Amounts to Negligent Homicide

The president’s behavior may not meet the term’s legal definition, but it captures the horror a government is visiting upon its people. | Written by James Fallows | 11/20/20

Image from The Atlantic article: MANDEL NGAN / AFP / GETTY

Fallows begins by defining the title saying, “Negligent homicide has a specific meaning in the law books. The standards of proof and categories of offense vary from state to state. But the essence is: Someone died because someone else did not exercise reasonable care.”

Then Fallows quickly drills down to the nitty gritty details of death for which Trump ultimately is responsible.

“More than a year ago, I argued in these pages that if Donald Trump held virtually anyother position of responsibility in modern society, he would already have been removed from that role. The article was called “If Trump Were an Airline Pilot,” and the examples ranged from CEOs to nuclear-submarine commanders to surgeons in an operating room. If any of them had demonstrated the impulsiveness, the irrationality, the vindictiveness, the ceaseless need for glorification that all distinguish Trump, responsible authorities would long ago have suspended them. The stakes—in lives, legal exposure, dollars and cents, war and peace—would be too great to do otherwise.

At the time of that comparison, the main case against Trump involved his temperamental, intellectual, and moral unfitness for the job. But since then we’ve moved into the realm of manslaughter. Yesterday nearly 2,000 Americans died of COVID-19. By Thanksgiving Day, another 10,000 to 15,000 will have perished. By year’s end, who knows? And meanwhile the person in charge of guiding the national response does nothing.”

Take some time to read all of Fallows’ article yourself and draw your own conclusions. Even better, subscribe to The Atlantic to support their work for without this 4th estate (the media) operating free and open, Donald Trump probably would have gotten away with his scam upon democracy and the American people. He would have destroyed it and installed himself as dictator of the Greatest Nation that collapsed in on itself.


Photo: Bébé — Drawing on Fence Surrounding the White House the Day After the Election Was Called for Joe Biden

Another moment I would like to memorialize here is how Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon opened their broadcast on the day the election was called for Biden (11/7/20). It had been a long week waiting for the all the state counts to come in and CNN was maintaining continuous coverage of these events because this was such an important collective moment. They came on just after Kamala Harris and Joe Biden had given their speeches in Delaware and the moment was really sinking in for everyone, even Trump (though he refuses to admit it publicly still that’s not his shtik, a Yiddish word for act or gimmick, trick or a prank).

I love how Chris begins by asking how his cohost and friend Don is feeling. It was an important moment because this allowed something fragile, illusive, raw, and rare to emerge. All credits for the excerpt below goes to CNN’s transcripts page — thank you CNN!


CHRIS CUOMO, CNN HOST: Good to see you, sharing history once again. And tonight is a big night for America. What does it mean? Well, we’ll discuss it together.

But we know this. For now, we have a President Elect Joe Biden. He came out, he addressed the nation and gave a call to give each other a chance, he said. That this is a time to heal. And literally, he’s right. We are sick from COVID right now, and a poison politics that is every bit as virulent. Don, how you’re feeling?

DON LEMON, CNN HOST: It’s – I almost can’t talk right now, because of the emotion that we will get to. So I’m not sure how much I want to say right off the top. But, you know, I’ve said all along, we have two viruses that’s infecting this country, and that’s COVID and racism.

And what we witnessed tonight was the complete opposite of racism, with the diversity, with the acknowledgement of all kinds of people, with someone saying they want to represent every kind of American, even the people who didn’t vote for him. We had been starving for that in this country. And it has nothing to do with being a Democrat or Republican, or being Conservative, or Independent, or Liberal. It’s about human decency.

So I have to be quite honest with you, the entire day I was asleep, because we got off this – we got off the air at what seven this morning. I forget it’s been going back and forth, 7, 8, 9; we got here at 7 o’clock this morning. I went ahead and had breakfast with my fiance, right. I’m a black man, a gay American. I live in New York City.

I went ahead and had breakfast with my fiance. I haven’t had time – that much time to spend with him. We had breakfast. I went home, I went to sleep. I am staying in a hotel because of these crazy hours not far from here. I heard – I’m on the 40th floor, Chris. I heard people cheering 40 floors below me. And I woke up and I said what is going on?

And I opened the drapes and I could see the city around me people were cheering in New York City. I turn the television on. And there were my colleagues announcing that Joe Biden had become the president elect of the United States, and not to forget, Kamala Harris, the first black woman. I didn’t expect to be so overwhelmed by that.

I didn’t realize the PTSD, that many marginalized people, that African-Americans, women, Latinos, people of color, all kind of White people – PTSD that people are feeling around this country, because we have had whiplash from someone who only cares about himself and not uniting people.

Chris over just the last 6, 7, 8 months, you and I have been together. You have been – you were sick. I was – I worried, I thought one of my best friends was going to die. I cried on the air. We have more than 200,000 Americans who have died. And as a journalist, we have an obligation to tell the truth.

And we have been telling the truth about what this administration, this President has been doing with this virus. And so you got sick. I’ve lost – I lost a close childhood friend, I lost a close adult friend. Both of them died from complications from COVID. And then along came George Floyd. And I had to sit in cover that story – we all did, about a man who died on the street and we all watch it on videotape, from someone who seemed to not care about human life, just sat there with his knee on the neck. And we had all these protests around the country.

So immediately, my thoughts went back to these protests that happened this summer and when I saw and heard what was happening today, all I can think of was – think of was, how could we not have expected that if Joe Biden became the president elect of the United States that the streets would not erupt after what had happened in this country?

Just – and I’m just talking about the last eight months. I’m not talking about all the stuff that we dealt with before – the fake news and people yelling at us on the street and people calling me nigger and fag and all kinds of things, and you’re fake news and all of that. Never before that I’ve been in this business since 1991, have I ever had to deal with the crap that I’ve had to deal with over the last four years. It is disgusting.

And so just over the last months – last couple months, we’ve had all of that. And over the past few nights we have been saying, we’re going to give you some information. We don’t know who’s going to win. We’re going to – America was – and they’re yelling at us, please, please call this. We are sick of it. We cannot take much more of it.

And so when the call finally came, and I saw my colleagues – and I love all of them and everybody around, they’re all talking about – what about this and who’s this and they were – Democrats didn’t do this and Democrats – that’s not what America wanted. America needed a release valve at that moment. And they wanted to get it off their chest. It was like a third world country, people who have been oppressed.

[23:05:00] Finally, the relief came that no longer that we have to live under this oppression. No longer that we have to live under people who’re pretending that up is not up and down is not down, that one plus one doesn’t equal two. And so I can’t help but be emotional at this moment. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to say. So forgive me. I may not say all the right things tonight. I am very emotional. And guess what, I’m speaking for everyone.

But I got to tell you, when I watched that Black woman come out on stage tonight, and I saw all of those people from of all ages and all different backgrounds – the whole entire theme was everyone is welcome under this tent, we don’t care who you are. We don’t care if you voted for us or not. You’re all part of this American experiment.

It was – I was so overwhelmed to hear that. I don’t care what people think. If they think I’m biased tonight, I don’t care, because I’m not a Democrat, I’m not a Republican, I’m not a Conservative, not I’m not a Liberal, I am an American. And we all deserve to be able to live in this country and have respect.

And what this administration and what this president doesn’t do, they do not respect people, or anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe. And so I’m very emotional. So when you ask me how I’m feeling right now, I’m sorry. That’s all I can tell you. This is how I feel right now. I am so happy to have this platform to be able to do this.

I may not have it after this. But I really don’t care. I am so happy to live in a country that has an administration that is going to go in regardless, I’m going to challenge them on their policies, I’m going to hold them to account. But when you say we’re all welcome, and we’re all equal in this country, amen. I’m in on that. And I love you. 

CUOMO: I’m glad I asked.

LEMON: Thank you for letting – thank you for letting me say that. And I got your phone call in the middle of the day. And I loved that you were out there with your daughter in the streets with people and showing her what true diversity is and what being a true American is. It’s not just performative – putting up flags and putting big flags in your yard. And I heard someone say, Oh, I don’t understand why – how Joe Biden could win, because I didn’t see a lot of flags and I didn’t see a lot of people with big events.

That is not what this country is about. It’s not about performative patriotism. It’s not about who can hang the biggest flag. It’s about who has the biggest heart. And who – who has class, who can turn the other cheek, who can forgive their neighbor. That’s what being a real patriot is. It’s not performative. It’s what’s – it’s what you hold in here and I hope we can get back to that. That’s it. I’m through for now. Thank you for letting–

Note: We should all take a moment to write our stories about this past weekend…imho...


Photo: Bébé — Drawing on Fence Surrounding the White House the Day After the Election Was Called for Joe Biden

In the past 8 months of watching CNN (more than ever I did before but I wanted to learn about COVID-19 and be informed about the Presidential election). In this time, I have come to greatly enjoy the little bits of dialog they share with viewers every night when Chris’ program ends and Don’s begins. They often tackle issues they do not always agree upon. They do it with passion, humor, and respect for each other. They are showing us in real time how all of us can have these types of extremely important, but often uncomfortable conversations. This is how we process, distill, and refine consciousness together. This work is absolutely necessary to sublimate consciousness as individuals and as collectives. You cannot transform consciousness and lift it to a higher level until you channel, process, refine, and purify–an refine again and again until you get different distillations can be sublimate a critical first step to transformation.

You skip these steps–your calculus of consciousness gets reset to the beginning and you get to start all over again–just like my friend Barry Kort was pointing out in his enjoyment of watching how all the crazy characters in Once Upon a Time were constantly recalculating their actions to get better outcomes and the aftermath that often follows miscalculations! Don’t we love the AfterMath and the chaos that often ensuing when we miscalculate our actions in the world. Thank you Barry Kort for this brilliant illumination of who we are as human beings… perhaps we are simply Consciousness Calculators… if we are, I love it!


Photo: Bébé — Drawing on Fence Surrounding the White House the Day After the Election Was Called for Joe Biden

The next moment from this broadcast I want to illuminate is Don’s interview with House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina. This is important because back when the Democrats were trying to pick their candidate to run against Trump, it was James Clyburn when he made public who he was voting for in the Democratic Party presidential primaries taking place just before COVID-19 was going to turn the world upside down that consolidated support for Joe Biden that ended up being the spark that swept through Super Tuesday. All credits for the excerpt below goes to CNN’s transcripts page


LEMON: We are living history. Once again, another historic administration is coming – the Biden-Harris administration. Black voters overwhelmingly backed Biden by a margin – a margin of 87 percent to 12 percent, that’s according to the exit polls, playing a very crucial role in this election.

So let’s talk to the highest ranking Black American in Congress, and that’s House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina. Thank you so much for joining us, Congressman, how you doing?

REP. JAMES CLYBURN (D-SC): I’m doing good, and thank you very much for having me.

LEMON: Yes. I spoke to you. I think, it was one week ago and here we are now.

CLYBURN: Yes.

LEMON: I have to admit. I don’t know any other way. But honestly, it’s been a very emotional day for me. I tweeted out earlier that I was in Grant Park for Barack Obama and then now I am reporting on the first Black woman to be vice president of the United States. It’s an amazing time to be an American.

CLYBURN: It really is. And I think that people ought to think a little bit about this. Here we are about to inaugurate a gentlemen, who was Vice President to the first African-American president, as far as we know, and is also going to be president with the first African- American, Asian-American vice president. That is a tremendous thing. And also the daughter of immigrants.

I think this campaign when you’re still going to look at it and the Biden-Harris ticket, they say so much about what this country is all about. And you and I know, you are Louisianan, and I’m a South Carolinian, but we know what it is to live in a part of the country that has wrestled with these issues for years.

And we’ve been doing, I think, great work toward that more perfect union, until four years ago. And it turns out that the country took a big step backwards. And so this campaign and the success of this campaign, I think, is an indication of what a lesson Tocqueville said about the country when he wrote that America is not great because it is more enlightened than any other nation, but rather, because it has always been able to repair its faults.

The election Donald Trump opened up a fault line in the country. The election of Joe Biden is an attempt to repair that fault. And I think he will succeed.

LEMON: Did you have – I’m sure you did. But talk to me about how underserved – people who are in minority and underserved communities, what they had been dealing with over the last four years, this is beyond politics. Many of us have been under attack from this administration.

CLYBURN: Yes, and that’s what bothered me so much about the administration. George W. Bush and I have are good buddies. Yes, I won’t use the word friends, because we’ve never really had a close relationship. But we have a good working relationship. And we’re buddies and we still are.

We chatted at John Lewis’s funeral. Here’s George W. Bush, coming from Texas, to appear at the Homegoing service of John Lewis. And we got a president who barely acknowledges the first African-American to lie in state – in the state’s capitol. And I want to be sure that everybody understands, I know Rosa Parks, she was in repose. She was not in state. John Lewis was in state, and there’s a difference.

So he’s the first African-American, but we got a president who refused to even acknowledge that to be the case. It would seem to me he would have paid respects at the Capitol. That’s the kind of indignity that this guy has heaped up on African Americans.

I was on the program earlier today with Omarosa. I will never get over the fact that this president looked into a camera, spoke into a microphone and called Omarosa a dog. I will never be able to get over that.

[23:30:00]

I can’t get over the fact that this president looked at a mob down in Charlottesville, Virginia, and called them and said that there were good people on both sides. To have a president of the United States, driving wedges between people, it’s just not a good thing.

We know this is not a perfect country. This country back in 1619 brought their first African-Americans to these shores and they were enslaved and that’s lasted for 244 years. And then for another 100 years we had apartheid. He didn’t call it that. But “separate, but equal” was apartheid, no different than what we had in South Africa.

But this country wrestled with that. And in 1954, the United States Supreme Court in a unanimous nine to zero decision, Chief Justice, a Republican appointed by Republican, not partisan politics, but Americans said that’s wrong, and we’re going to do something about correcting that. And to have this president come in, and try to undo all of that, and try to turn the clock back, this is just too much to take for too many people.

LEMON: I want to talk to you about that, especially about working with – listen, there’s a difference between Republicans and Democrats trying to work together, then trying to work with someone who wants to deny reality, or deny that there’s systemic racism, or deny that people aren’t treated differently in this country. It’s really tough sometimes.

And I just have to be honest with you, Congressman, it’s really tough to sometimes to sit here and have to talk to people who you know are bigots, you know, they’re racists. And you have to sometimes pretend that there is some sense of fairness in the questions or in them, when you know, they’re not going to tell the truth, when you know, they’re making excuses for racism. 

How do you do that? Give us all some advice, including me. How do you do that when you are a representative? And you know over the past four years, many of the people who are not in your party have denied that there is even racism in this country, and has condoned every bigoted thing this president does, makes excuses for us. Help us out here what do we do?

CLYBURN: Well, I understand your frustration with that. And quite frankly, I’m frustrated a whole lot over the years. But I always try to look at the big picture. And I know what my parents went through much of what your parents went through. And I know a lot of the indignities that they suffered in order for me to be where I am today.

And so I take a lot of that, as part of what I need to deal with in order to make those three daughters of mine, those four grandchildren I have, to make sure that they have a better life. Strom Thurmond and I had a very good working relationship. Strom Thurmond and I did not agree on much, but we worked together on behalf of the people of South Carolina.

His sister Gertrude was one of my best friends and Strom, he is talking all the time. My sister Gertrude just loves you. Well, it’s because I recognize that our backgrounds, our experiences have been different. And I worked to do what I could to help reconcile those differences. I’ve always said that if the distance between me and opponent on any issue are five steps, I don’t mind taking three of them.

LEMON: Amen.

CLYBURN: And so that’s just the way that I have operated. And I will say to you, you do such a good job in the profession that you’re in. I just admire your work. I watch you every night. And I just think you do a good job. Don’t let the disagreements, the setbacks, define your profession, work to overcome that. And you do a good job of it. Keep doing it.

[23:35:00]

Don’t let anybody throw cold water on your dreams. And that’s what we’re doing. They come along, see your dreams and aspiration – I tell people all the time, I’m practicing Eleventh Commandment. And Ronald Reagan used to say it all the time. Though, I heard it before Ronald Reagan ever said it. Thou shalt not throw cold water on another man’s dreams.

LEMON: Amen. I got to – David, the producer is just giving me just a minute. I’ve got to ask this one question. I apologize. I’m going to take a little longer here.

CLYBURN: Sure.

LEMON: So this is what I want to ask you. Right after the president- elect talked about all the people he wanted this coalition, which includes every American, he said this, OK. He said he especially wanted to make – and I think he was talking about you in large part.

And he said, and “especially for the moment when this campaign was at its lowest, the African-American community stood up again for me. They always have my back. And I’ll always have yours.” That’s when I started crying watching that speech. And that was because of you what happened in South Carolina. You revived this man’s campaign. The reason we have a president-elect Joseph Biden today is in large part because of James Clyburn.

CLYBURN: And James Clyburn stood where he did on that occasion, because of who – a young – not so young lady at St. John’s Baptist Church, who said to me just before the South Carolina primary, I need to know who you voted for. And when I told her, she looked in my face, and she said to me, I needed to hear that and this community needs to hear from you. It wasn’t Jim Clyburn. It was Mrs. Jones, sitting on the front Pew of St. John’s Baptist Church in Richland County, South Carolina. I did what I did for her, because she told me that she wanted to hear that. So, yes, it wasn’t Jim Clyburn. It was those people, my constituents, who told me time and time again, how they wanted me to conduct myself. And Mrs. Jones told me on that day, how she wanted me to stand up in this presidential election. And I responded to her wishes. 

LEMON: Congressman, it’s always a pleasure. I thank you so much. 

CLYBURN: Thank you about that.

LEMON: We appreciate you, and we love you. Thank you so much.

CLYBURN: Love you too, brother.

LEMON: And I see that Omega Psi Phi. I see that back there cute dog. And we see that Alpha Kappa Alpha is out there all for–

CLYBURN: They are roaming in the room for all the haters.

LEMON: Say again?

CLYBURN: I said, they are roaming in the room for all you haters. I tell all my Divine Nine brothers and sisters, in the final analysis, you may not know it, but you will end up in your Omega Chapter.

LEMON: Thank you. And we are appreciating the AKAs out there as well and the Deltas and don’t get mad, my sister was a Kappa sweetheart, so you know, it takes all kind.

CLYBURN: Well, that’s great. That’s great. And look, just remember, I told her – Kamala that I was an AKA through November 3rd, so her success allows me to go back to being the cute dog that I have.

LEMON: Thank you, Congressman. You be well. Thanks.

CLYBURN: Thank you.

LEMON: So America is getting to know its next Vice President. And coming up, we’re going to talk to a lifelong friend about the Kamala Harris. She knows on this remarkable night in American politics. We’ll be right back.


Photo: Bébé — Drawing on Fence Surrounding the White House the Day After the Election Was Called for Joe Biden

One more clip that I want to illuminate from this moment is the following which aired November 8, 2020 – 01:00   ET (CNN transcripts).


LEMON: Mmm! 

Let’s discuss now. Big night for America. John Avlon, S.E. Cupp, Nia- Malika Henderson. Hello, one and all. 

So what happened today in America?

(CROSSTALK) JOHN AVLON, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: Look, this is a day to savor. This is from the celebrations that have been breaking out across the country, from New York, I realize Biden finally won when people started clacking pots and pans outside their windows and the celebrations and the car honking. 

This is one of the moments, using Biden was favorite poems, where hope and history run. And I think you’re feeling a deep sense that our democracy that has risen up in unprecedented numbers and really shown how strong it is. 

LEMON: I want to talk about the diversity that we have seen across the country. Listen, whether you supported the president or not, you had to — you see the pictures. These are young people, old people, all different ethnicities, either out there today celebrating or at the acceptance speech tonight in Delaware. 

S.E. CUPP, CNN HOST: It was a really welcome, refreshing, uplifting, optimistic sight. And, you know, I experienced today from sort of two different perspectives, the first as a Republican who voted for Biden. 

And let me tell you, it has not been easy to be a never-Trumper over the past four years. It’s not always been comfortable. It’s been lonely. 

But I never bought into the need to make America great. I voted for Joe Biden to make America good again. And I think today our vote was not in vain. And that felt really good. 

The other way I experienced today was as a woman. 

And, Don, you and have I talked about this before. The greatest indignity of the past four years for women is not just that men are running the country; these men are running the country. 

And so to see a woman elected to go into the White House was really something. 

And I’ll just end by sharing a personal anecdote. I never talk about politics with my kid because he is 5 and he has a life. 

(LAUGHTER)

CUPP: Also, I just don’t want — why would I foist this upon him?

But it was big day. I was obviously watching TV and he comes in and he sees Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the screen. 

He says, “What’s happening, Mom?

And I said, “Well, those two people were just chosen today to lead the country.” 

And he goes, “That’s a woman.” 

Could you lead the country, Mom?” And to say that I got emotional is an understatement. But when we talk about the need to see people like us represented in politics, in positions of power, in popular culture, it is that simple as to why. It is childlike as to why. 

[01:35:00]

CUPP: Because it matters to see yourself depicted back, reflected back. And in that moment, my son became a man who believes that women can do anything. And that was a very positive experience for me. 

LEMON: Wow. 

NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: No, I agree. All day hearing from friends and family about what this moment meant to them, my wife texting me as she was watching Kamala Harris, saying, wow, not only is Kamala Harris the vice president-elect; she acknowledged Black women in her speech, shouted them out in her speech and talked about Black women, the troubles and travails of Black women and the ways in which they’ve been the backbone of the country. 

To have that moment was really quite meaningful. My friend, who is Puerto Rican; his mom is 82 years old, lives in South Carolina, voted for the first time in a presidential election this year and was crying when the announcement came. 

And she felt like finally. This was a country that could she feel included in and that she voted for this president who was going to turn the world right side up again. So, so many emotions today seeing the outpouring of emotion of other people, because I think, over these last four years, there has been so much anxiety, stress and fear and pain, particularly from marginalized communities, women, people of color, gay folks like you and me, Don. 

And to just have this release today, that things will be different and we don’t have to wake up every day and see what Trump is tweeting, see what Republicans are excusing Trump from tweeting — 

LEMON: It’s like you become used to it. It’s normalized, right?

And all of a sudden you realize, it doesn’t have to be this way, there is, like I said earlier, there is this release valve. Wait a minute. 

CUPP: Exactly right. 

LEMON: This doesn’t have to be this way. And I have to say doubly so, we’re talking about diversity and minorities. 

But for women, for you to acknowledge what you just said, I thought that was beautiful, because your son may have grown up if this would continue. 

What is he, 5, 6?

CUPP: 5. 

LEMON: Not ever seeing what he saw today. And just the mere presence. 

CUPP: And he doesn’t know what he saw, right?

He doesn’t know. I don’t talk to him about feminism or — he’s 5. He cares about “Paw Patrol.” But what he saw was a woman could do anything. And he got that. 

LEMON: S.E., as a Republican woman, a conservative woman and you see what’s happened over the last few years with Trumpism, do you have any idea where this goes? 

What — have I some idea what the folks at home who are seeing because it shows up on my timeline, people who have found my contact information, you know. It doesn’t just go away. 

Is that wishful thinking to say that the madness and the craziness is going to go away from that group of people?

Because I don’t think it’s reflective of all conservatives but it’s certainly taken over the party. 

CUPP: Yes, listen. I think there is — we’ve seen two schools of thought right now emerging. And this is the mess that Joe Biden will inherit. There are people who want to unite enough to get him elected, right, and really want to come together. 

And then there are folks who really don’t have that interest at all. Those folks are on the Right. A lot of Trump supporters who have no interest in understanding one another

They’re also on the Left. A lot of folks who say, Trump supporters, eff you and good riddance and I’m going to step over your bodies on the way out. I think that attitude gets us three more Trumps at some point. 

We’ve got to figure out with a way to not excuse racism and bigotry disguised as economic insecurity; to not excuse it but to understand why we got here. 

LEMON: I got to get to the break, because I’m getting clobbered. Quick if you can. 

AVLON: Biden’s entire campaign core message was about this: question people’s judgment, not their motives. I’m a Democrat but I’ll be an American president. That I think ultimately is why you saw this turnout. We had a choice on this election between unity and division. And that’s why the relief. 

LEMON: Chris and have I been talking about. 

How do you do it?

That’s a mandate, if you want to call it, for the Biden-Harris administration but also, they’ve got to have people buy into it. 

How do you achieve that? We don’t know. But we’re going to try to continue to figure it out. We’ll be right back. 

You’re Fired… Or Wait… Maybe Not!!

Photo: Bébé — Drawing on Fence Surrounding the White House the Day After the Election Was Called for Joe Biden

S.E. Cupp is absolutely right!!! When our consciousness get split as individuals, it is considered a simple neurosis. When our collective consciousness gets split, the result into polarized politics. I think this splitting is entirely normal part of synthesizing and processing consciousness so that we understand it and can apply it more effectively in our lives. Doing this helps us see the other side more clearly–the divide begins inside. But, when we keep splitting and dividing until we grow so far apart from the other side we can no longer see the other side, then we have entered a very dangerous space within the Field of Mind. It is a very deep and dark place: the Pit of Division.

I made a mini movie about the day after we learned Biden won that I titled: You’re Fired — After the Math Was Done!

You’re Fired — After the Math Was Done

In the description, I say: “All of us are part of the light, if we choose to be. The light is love. Division is a deep, dark hole that we can fall into many ways…often starting small like getting angry with your brother or sister, or becoming pissed off about something a friend forgot to do, or getting pushed in by deceptive, manipulative people. It doesn’t matter how you get there… it’s just dark with the dirt of division, mistrust, hate, jealousy, resentment, bitterness, greed, rapacity, avarice…you get the idea. So, fill up you’re hole up with the sweet, nourishing waters of love, which runs deep inside of you… in the place we call soul.”


So we all have a role in the fate of the country. And we all can help heal the division by filling up our personal Pits of Division with the nourishing waters of peace, love, and understanding (I think there is a fairly famous song about this). There is nothing wrong or bad about falling into a pit. We all do it…all of the time…it’s one of the flaws or beautiful aspects of being human. It’s whether we stay there or not that really counts!

One Vote

(  Photo Credit: Dean Terry )

Description of this episode: “Come election season, it’s easy to get cynical. Why cast a ballot if your single measly vote can’t possibly change anything?

In our first-ever election special, we set off to find a single vote that made a difference. We venture from the biggest election on the planet – where polling officials must brave a lion-inhabited forest to collect the vote of an ascetic temple priest – to the smallest election on the planet – where there are no polling officials, only kitty cats wearing nametags. Along the way, we meet a too-trusting advice columnist, a Texan Emperor, and a passive-aggressive mom who helped change American democracy forever.”

Reported by Latif Nasser with help from Tracie Hunte. Produced by Simon Adler, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen and Latif Nasser. 


I only heard the beginning of this episode, but there are some absolutely shocking stories of where exactly one vote shaped world history. A couple of the things that shocked me included:

  • King Charles I of England was accused by the House of Commons in 1649 of treason against his subjects, one solitary vote cost him his throne and his head,
  • France from a monarchy to a republic in 1875 by one vote.
  • Thomas Jefferson was elected President by the House of Representatives in 1801 by one vote after an Electoral College tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.
  • Adolf Hitler was elected to be leader of the Nazi party by one vote!

— This list was complied from an article by Carl Hendrickson.


The Calculus of Chaos

Carduus — Thistle (Photo by Bébé)

Steve Schmidt (who was a senior advisor on John McCain’s campaign in 2008) is a co-founded of the Lincoln Project, which is a group of Republicans who banded together to help get rid of Trump. In an interview with Axios, Schmidt said, “Trumpism is a “noxious weed” and America needs to root it out.”

In an interview with Alex Kantrowitz, host of Big Technology Podcast, in partnership with OneZero, Steve Schmidt says:

“It’s impossible to talk about any of this without talking about the legacy of the most dangerous and the most injurious immigrant to America in all of our long history, and that’s Rupert Murdoch. And so we’ve had an increasingly extreme, very sophisticated, inner woven series of institutions that monetize billions of dollars driving anger and misinformation in this country, from talk radio, Fox; Facebook is a cancerous part of this mix as well now.

In essence, what voting has become for a lot of people in this country is an act of aggression where the vote is to impose punishment by electing a faction to do harm to the other faction that’s viewed as the enemy. And you see this playing out with Trump refusing federal aid for California because of the fires, threatening Democratically run states and cities.

There’s a lot, obviously, of racial animus that’s teeming throughout the Trump movement and that has been stoked by him. And the party that is the home for in our politics clearly in this era is the Republican Party. That’s part of it as well. We, as a country, have not addressed in any type of meaningful way the question of, what type of society, what type of country do we want to live in in 20 years?”

Schmidt explained that back in 2016, both Presidential candidates lied to the people:

“Hillary went there and lied and said that the clean energy jobs were coming. So this is an economically depressed, isolated part of the country, it’s really in a lot of ways fundamentally unchanged but for the devastation of the opioid epidemic since Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson toured through there in the late 1960s talking about poverty. And so Donald Trump went back and he said the coal jobs are coming back. What’s the easier lie to believe? The lie where there’s still remembrance of a life that’s no longer there but still seems within touch, or about jobs in a world that never existed ever in the first place, just a fantasy?”

Alex Kantrowitz begins this interview by asking Schmidt what’s happened to the Republican Party since 2008?

Schmidt replies: “The Republican party is in a state of moral, intellectual, and spiritual collapse right now. There’s not even a pretense that it stands for issues and you can evidence that by looking at the platform. And what the platform of the party says, ratified at the convention this summer, in essence confirms that the party is a cult of personality where to be in good standing requires obedience and loyalty to Donald Trump. And so what the party’s become in essence is an organized conspiracy to maintain political power for the advancement of the self-interest of the elected officials and the donor class that supports them.

It’s devoid of any principles, whether it’s the nutty pastors, the frauds, the money changers in the temple if you will, the Billy Graham Jrs., the Jerry Falwell Jrs., crazy Pastor Paul, the Joel Osteens of the world, these are the people that occupy a religiosity space around the party absurdly. You look at the Matt Gates’ and the Mark Meadows’ and the anti intellectualism, the anti-science, the abrasive incompetence, cronyism, corruption, the willful turning of the blind eye to all of Trump’s excesses.


If you are interested in these ideas, then you should read the full transcript of Alex Kantrowitz’s interview with Steve Schmidt, which is titled ‘Lincoln Project Co-Founder Steve Schmidt on Politics in the Age of Social MediaIf you have a message, you have conviction.

I am interested in Steve Schmidt’s insights because he sheds light (illuminates) the dark places on the Republican stage who the current actors on the stage want to keep hidden (mostly disgruntled, disgusting, angry white men). They want to hide and obscure these realities in the dark because it helps them mislead people down the path of authoritarianism.

This is what caught my attention about Steve Schmidt. I heard him say these things about Rupert Murdoch in an interview he gave to the BBC on Monday (11/9/20). Murdoch is part of a much deeper, darker arch of human consciousness playing out in the minds of ordinary men and women. It is a very old arch alive and well inside the human psyche. It is capable of ruthless totalitarian rulership that benefits only a chosen few. Those who are not chosen are at great risk of genocide. We have seen this before–many times in history. Unfortunately, unless we grow consciously as individuals and as collectives, we will see it again–just as S.E. says very accurately in the CNN interviews. She is a Republican woman, but she has not turned off her mind or heart, just as Steve Schmidt has not.

Will we pay attention and recalculate our collective path?

Or will we fall back into the Pit of Division and Darkness and Death?

And, I do understand the calculation of ignorance. It is a much easier path. Or so it seems when you first start down it. In the end, ignorance is the path to evil. It is the place in the human soul where the anti-lifers live. Spell evil backwards–l…i…v…e–those who end up in this inner hell cannot let others live and let live. They’ve sold their soul to the Merchants of Mischief and Misdeeds. And, these merchants have robbed them and left them naked and bear to a world that mocks them. So, to avert this sad and sorry end, the individuals marching down the path of ignorance must control everyone, everything. It is their only hope. Their favorite weapon is to ignore reality and to ignore others who do not look and act and talk just like them.

Knowledge is a heavy burden because once an individual knows something, action is required. And action takes strength, endurance, and energy. Right action is time consuming. It can eat so much of your time up that it leaves you no time to focus on yourself and what you want (or perhaps, it’s what you thought you wanted until you learned more about how reality works).

Ignorance is indeed a strong and noxious weed, just as Schmidt said in his Axios interview.

Do we have the courage, wisdom, and inner constitution needed to take action on what is real or is it more convenient to hide huge parts of our shared reality in the darkness of our ignorance?

Time will tell… that’s for sure…

How Whiteness Affected The Election

Image from 1A: Donny Wadkins holds a US flag outside the Pennsylvania Convention Center as ballot counting in the presidential election continues inside in Philadelphia.BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images

The dirty little secret of American democracy is a long and destructive history of racism. It is a part of the current Republican stage kept wrapped in many, many layers of ignorance. It exists on Democratic stage too. If you are human, you are susceptible to secrets often kept for selfish reasons.

This is what I really like about this episode of 1A. It is a frank conversation about lies and selfishness. The guests take apart the monolithic ways we like to think of groups of people. No group is monolithic. Eddie Glaude says, “Black men can be just as selfish as white me.” He attributes much of the willingness of huge groups of people who voted for Trump as sprouting from a deep tap root of selfish impulses.


Trump is a very selfish man who promises to protect the selfish people of America. It is an effective rallying cry for individuals who have amassed a decent amount of money to live the lifestyle they choose that includes lots of fun time. It is a myth that Trump supporters are working-class and poor. We knew this back in 2016, see Washington Post article: It’s time to bust the myth: Most Trump voters were not working class.

The Voter Study Group published a fascinating article about Trump voters in 2017 titled: The Five Types of Trump Voters — Who They Are and What They Believe written by Emily Ekins.

Graphic from The Voter Study Group

The danger of simplifying reality is that we won’t understand it and because of this we will not take the action required to equalize inequities, disintegrate lies, and repair tears and rips in our shared human reality. The costs of not doing this has been all too evident and clear in the past 4 years of Trump. However, the gravity of ignorance is strong for it promises the delusion that life is easy if you follow the rules of those holding power. Many do.


The Pandemic Is The Worst. What Can We Do To Keep Coping?

Image from 1A: Residents head out to the Bethpage Bikeway in New York. Many residents have mostly remained in their homes for the past weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

This entire episode is about loneliness and the pandemic. It is so nourishing to listen to Jen White talk about the deep impacts of being lonely with NPR’s Shankar Vedantam and the U.K.’s Minister of Loneliness.

Description: “People. We know it’s bad out here during the coronavirus pandemic. And at 1A, we’re lucky enough to be able to largely work from home and keep doing our jobs bringing the news to you. But almost everyone is having a tough time, especially with the emotional toll of maintaining social distancing, the labor to keep up with shifting pandemic guidance and the significant added stress on essential employees as they keep going to work.

The New York Times spoke with Aya Raji, 14, about what happened when her school turned to remote learning: “I felt like I was trapped in my own little house and everyone was far away,” Aya, 14, said. “When you’re with friends, you’re completely distracted and you don’t think about the bad stuff going on. During the beginning of quarantine, I was so alone. All the sad things I used to brush off, I realized I couldn’t brush them off anymore.


Will continue to add content from time to time.

Slow Down My Friend… Slow Down…

My friend John Kellden moderates one of the most thought provoking groups on Facebook (Conversations that Mind and Matter). But as a whole, Facebook is not a very thought place to spend your precious time as a human being. Recently, I have come to call Facebook Fakebook to curb my serotonin addiction to this intoxicating platform that only makes me more depressed.

It is not our fault we have become addicted to it. From its inception, it has been engineered to capture our attention with emotionally charged posts that project some of the lowest levels of human consciousness possible.

Facebook has done this very intentionally by engineering algorithms designed to hack our evolutionary programming. There is nothing wrong with our evolutionary programming for it has evolved to alert us to novel things that may benefit us as well as alert us to dangerous things that may harm us.

But our modern world is far different than survival in a wild natural world, and so we waste our time scrolling through post after post looking for the ones that trigger our instincts and emotions, just as we would have looked for the novel or the dangerous things on the savannah. The result is a collective descent to the lowest levels of consciousness.

You may ask: “How bad can it be to spend a time on Fakebook?”

Look at reality. What do you see: a global pandemic with a second wave hitting that could be worse than the first; global economic recessions and food shortages that are hurting many more people than the pandemic has so far; political polarization that threaten to fracture and destroy the fabric of collaboration and cooperation that modern civilization depends upon to exist; and climate change that will finish off anything that survives these current challenges.

Each and every day we create human reality with our minds. Our minds are channels for consciousness. When we descend as individuals and collectives to the lowest realms of consciousness, our thoughts descend too, and thoughts are rehearsal for action in the world. Bad thoughts lead to bad action. Bad action leads to a reality that looks and feels closer to hell than heaven.

Thus, it is in our best interest to work daily to elevate where our conscious awareness dwells. This takes daily work because there is great gravity constantly pulling us back into the muck of the lowest levels of conscious existence–natural gravity and manufactured gravity.

Why is there this gravity inside the mind?

Because we are easier to control in the lower realms of being. So consider the next time you feel provoked by a post or a tweet: Who is trying to control you?

How are you addressing your absence of consciousness?

I will not go into the conversation John pinged me on other than to say it is titled: Card Session: How are you addressing your absence of consciousness? But, I will share my reply:

Alan Watts saved me after my baby dog Cider died two days before Christmas last year.

Tribute to Cider — This is the story of Cider dog of wonder and life

You ask — well, how did a dead man save you? His voice and lectures have been immortalized on YouTube in these Chillsteps and regular lectures… they are everywhere. I made a playlist of Watts and listened to a lot of them.

Then, I digested… for a long time. 

You ask, digested… what?

Consciousness… consciousness is digested just like food is digested. Eat crappy ideas, you get crappy, constipated consciousness just like someone who eats crappy food gets a weak and constipated body.

The daily practices you and Michael discuss is beautiful and essential and has been known for centuries, especially by civilizations of the East… but these practices have been lost in our fast-pace modern world where everyone is programmed to get there fast.

Where is there?

It doesn’t matter… you just got to get there and do it fast… don’t think about it… just GO. That is what our culture (Cult — ure) does to us in this now. It has gotten most of us so lost. Some many of us living now no longer know how to get to the deeper waters of our beingness.

This is what Watts talks about again and again in his beautiful lectures…the ones that comforted me (and saved me) in January 2020 — just before the world fell over Corona cliff. This time now, it is only a practice run for a bigger fall that is coming up really fast because we can’t slow down anymore as species. We’ve been programmed by the Cult-ure controllers to go super fast, to not stop, to not see reality, to rely on insufficient beliefs that have been made up by other people who have agendas that are do not have the common man or woman’s best interest in mind. 

So buckle up… because every bit of higher consciousness we can muster as a species blessed with this usual ability is going to be needed to survive the next cliff we are going to go over–be it global unrest and war or climate disasters resulting in global disease and hunger… or something else… whatever it is, we speeding to it faster and faster and faster than ever before…

I’ve put Alan Watts into my story I’m writing as one of my character’s AIs that compile playlists to help him figure out how to pull off a mass transformation of human consciousness before the survivors of Earth are snuffed out and humans go extinct: Ra’s Playlist of Alan Watts… 😉 I added this Chillstep to this list.

Alan Watts – Kouyou | Chillstep 2019 | The chill mix John pinged me on

Ra’s Playlist of Alan Watts — Ra is an AI helping one of the characters in Sapience understand how to transform human consciousness on a scale never before achieved. Stay tuned, you will meet Ra soon in Book 1.

It Was An Orange Day

I was compelled to make this intense reply after spending time editing and writing about my latest video in a series that I call Have You Been Outside Today?

I started making these mini movies to try to survive social distancing during this time of Corona. I found by making these videos, I look for the beauty in the world, and when I look beauty, I see incredible things!

I have come to realize this summer just how blind I have been to all the life unfolding around me everyday, even in a great big city like Washington, DC. I have also come to understand how we are programed to go fast through our lives so we don’t question the rules. More importantly, so we don’t question the social programming we have all been subjected to.

I learned this on the bike trail where I have been yelled at and almost hit by other bikers who feel it is their personal right to go fast and for all slower users to get out of their way.

It is certainly intoxicating to go fast, especially if you have an expensive bike or have chiseled your body into a speed machine. But that does not mean you have priority over others who choose to go slower on public trails. And yet I see again and again, the faster ones projecting their anger on the slower ones.

This reminds me of our human social reality where the individuals who have great wealth continually ignore and run over the ones who are barely surviving. These powerful people don’t notice the weaker ones because it is inconvenient to do so. It would force them to slow down, even abandon their fast-paced, speedy lives that has intoxicated them with their own personal power and glory.

In making these videos, I have learned to slow down and to see the beauty in this world. Seeing the beauty makes me happy, and this lifts me a little bit from the pit of depression I fell into due to circumstances that are well beyond my control. Seeing beauty has become like a life raft that I can rest upon in rising sea of unconsciousness that is full of angry sea monsters who are speed and power demons.

It Was An Orange Day Today — Music: Blush Puppies – Extreme (as featured on iPhone moviemaker–beautiful, expansive song for the soul) — Series: Have You Been Outside Today? — Photos/Videos: Me

For my latest video, I said the following:

I make these mini movies while biking around the DC area. I never know what I will see and learned that often the first thing capturing my attention is only to slow me down and stop so I can see something more singular and spectacular as a being living traveling with other beings who are all moving together through time.

Today, in addition to the beauty of the natural world living inside a mega city, I saw two human event unfolding in time that captured my attention. The first was a road sign set up along the bike trail that said: “If you see something suspicious report it to the police.” I did not photograph it because I did not understand its significance at the moment, only wondered if me stopping to take pictures was suspicious activity. It had not been there on my other rides. Then, it hit me after getting home it suddenly appeared there because of the terrorist plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer and blow up a bridge in Michigan. It could happen here and that’s where I saw this sign along the Woodrow Wilson bridge. On my last bike ride, I talked with a local developer who has lived his whole life in and around Alexandria. This is a major bridge in the DC area that cost $2.42 billion to build and undertaken by four partners: FHWA, VDOT, MSHA and DCDPW. It was featured on the Discovery Channel’s Extreme Engineering Series as the world’s largest drawbridge.

The other uncommon event I encountered was a march protesting the U.S. support of Turkey. Marchers held signs about a second genocide occurring in Turkey and funded by U.S. support of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who has held the office since 28 August 2014. ”The Ottoman Empire was since its foundation in c. 1299, ruled as an absolute monarchy. Between 1839 and 1876 the Empire went through a period of reform.The Young Ottomans who were dissatisfied with these reforms worked together with Sultan Abdülhamid II to realize some form of constitutional arrangement in 1876. After the short-lived attempt of turning the Empire into a constitutional monarchy, Sultan Abdülhamid II turned it back into an absolute monarchy by 1878 by suspending the constitution and parliament. A couple decades later a new reform movement under the name of the Young Turks conspired against Sultan Abdülhamid II, wand forced the sultan to reintroduce the constitutional rule in 1908. In 1909 they deposed the sultan and in 1913 seized power in a coup. In 1914 the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers as an ally of the German Empire and subsequently lost the war. In 1918 the leaders of the Young Turks took full responsibility for the lost war and fled into exile leaving the country in chaos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History…

The Armenian Genocide was the systematic mass murder and expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians carried out in Turkey and adjoining regions by the Ottoman government between 1914–1923. The starting date is conventionally held to be 4/24/15, the day Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders, the majority of whom were eventually murdered. The genocide occurred during & after World War I (first with wholesale killing of able-bodied men through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labour, followed by deportation of women, children, elderly, and infirm on death marches to the Syrian Desert. Driven forward by military escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to periodic robbery, rape, and massacre. Most Armenian diaspora communities around the world are a direct result of the genocide.” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenia…

Fakebook & Friedrich Nietzsche

Lastly, this post dovetails with a conversation I am having with another friend living in Germany and who just deactivated his Fakebook profile. He is a biologist and studies the domestication of animals, including human beings. He sent me the following message today:

“1888 — Friedrich Nietzsche …
had his last year of clarity in Turin. 
His last ideas were among
 Umwertung der Werte
New evaluating Values
which of course, is absurd. 
Nobody can do this.
It is a Phase Transition
driven by many forces- no person can influence or control.
The current hierarchy and ranking of values is shaky and gets ever more chaotic.
So when you want to say something to a greater audience
you see, all territories are occupied already by someone-
fiercely defending his gold digger claim.
There is no free place anymore.
all subjects are occupied multiple times.
So you will be quickly placed into a pre labelled Box- from which you never get out again.
and we are a mental fast food society.
your main theme must be recognizable in 3 seconds ,
and then the attention span switches to something else
and the impression you leave – is superseded by other stuff.
We fast become intellectually obese and concept resistant.
To succeed- you need a big Trumpet and blast your message full power 24 hours.
The process becomes extremely exhausting and power draining. 
I wonder myself- how to organize time in a way- to be most effective.
Ever harder to do.

We may have to overlay an idea, a text- with music and images, videos
to grab the short attention.
ADD becomes a normal condition – to be tolerated…
almost impossible to talk to anybody

The other way is to ignore all this
To follow your own intuition
to do the things with the utmost value for Yourself.
No matter- what anybody thinks of it and you.
To be emotionally independent
ARETE – the Greek expression for posture, how you stand for yourself in your own way.
The only way to find any resonance ever – is being a Naked Soul
Gymnos
to dive into the Core of Yourself.
Know WHO you are.
Speak your own voice in your language.
To be as strong as you possibly can.
Immune to daily criticism, insults, fights.
The Value you create will shine
A Light Tower.
Do Inner Strength Training every day.
become as strong as possible.
To create out of Strength and Power.
You will be so remarkable- you can not be ignored.
I doubt from my experience that Facebook will help you ever.
It is far to shallow and almost a Mind Opiate …”

Halloween & Consciousness

I write about Nietzsche in my story that I have again been knocked sidewise from writing due to circumstances beyond control in my life, but Nietzsche features brightly in this final chapter I am trying to see clearly so I can get Book 1 published sooner than later. The timeline for my story beginning in 2020 in October. My fictional story is outpacing my ability to write it. Oh well… I realize it is the same in mind space as it is city spaces and natural spaces… to see the most singular and spectacular things, you must slow down!


Being its October and this post has a distinctly Halloween theme, check out my Last DJ’s Haunted & the Edge Playlist. Avoiding our inner darkness is not the way to evolve consciously. This is what the Last DJ learned, and this is what he preaches through his musical sermons in this fictional future. Here are some of the songs and stories he draws from to saved the survivors of Earth.

Lloyd’s Haunted & the Edge Playlist

This is a playlist created by the Last DJ of Earth who is trying to save survivors of Earth after a global catastrophe. He hacks Multinational satellites to broadcast his musical sermons, working day and night to bring down Earth’s new overlords–the ones who worship money.

Consciousness is the key. The Sapience Series tells this tale. Follow this site for when the first book is available: Sapience: The Moment is Now.

We Are The Story Earth Needs Now

Kurt Vonnegut, Shape of Stories

Each and every one of us is a story unfolding through space and time. Our stories are about what happen to us in our journey as a living being on Earth.

All living beings are unfolding stories…Homo sapiens simply gained awareness of their story as it unfolds, thus gaining the ability to alter it by choosing an action different than what nature would have dictated. This ability to be aware of our individual story of being a living being traveling through time is perhaps more singularly defining of being human than having a big brain, intelligence, or using tools.

Stories are to the awaken psyche as skin is to the body. They help to consolidate and contain the flow of consciousness through our being. They give our life meaning and purpose. They inspire action and galvanize collective action: culture–the most fundamental building blocks of every great civilization because stories help to bind us to one another.

They are perhaps the greatest culture building tool we have in our toolbox. It is through stories that great and powerful civilizations convey the symbols and images that excite people and spur them to action. So, figuring out how to tell a good stories is not only important for writers but for living a meaningful, productive, and powerful life as an individual and as a collective.

I love Vonnegut’s vignette above about storytelling because he is so darn genuine and playful! He very much echoes the same ideas that Alan Watts talks about in his many lectures, which is basically how to live a good and meaningful life by paying attention to our inner world and inner stories because these shape our outer world and realities whether we are aware of what we have chosen or not.


Two things I heard in the past 24 hours about how important stories are in cultivating our inner spaces include the following:

Honoring lives lost in the COVID-19 pandemic — Oct 9, 2020 6:20 PM EDT

I always sit down and watch the stories of the beautiful people who we have lost in just 7 months of COVID-19.

This story particularly resonated with me: “Those who knew 63-year-old Wanda Key said her personality was like magic. Her sister spoke of her giggle and a smile that would light up a room. Called Peppa by all those who knew her, she was a nurse practitioner, serving her Nashville community for 30 years. A beloved daughter, sister and mother, Peppa often shared a favorite quote with her sons: “What we achieve inwardly will change outward reality.


RIVA LEHRER — © 2020 Riva Lehrer. All rights reserved. [SIMON: And at the heart of your work, I think you’d agree today, are the extraordinary portraits that are called circle stories. They’re collaborative.]

And, I listen to NPR when I work and heard this amazing interview where Scott Simon speaks to the acclaimed painter, writer and teacher about her new book (Golem Girl) recounting a life growing up with spina bifida.

Below is the part of this interview that caught my attention, and I’ve highlight where Riva beautifully recounts the importance of story in our lives. She describes it akin to weaving who we are as human beings in relationship with each other.

We can’t help it… we are unfolding stories through time. This is why learning how to slow down and to stop and listen to each other’s stories is such a gift to ourselves and all humanity and life on Earth. It’s how we evolve consciously.

Here is the part of the interview that sent shivers down my back:

SIMON: And at the heart of your work, I think you’d agree today, are the extraordinary portraits that are called circle stories. They’re collaborative.

LEHRER: Yes. So I’ll meet someone – and it’s not all people with disabilities. What I really am interested in is stigma. And it can be queerness. It can be impairment. It can be a whole range of things. So I’ll fall in love with what they do and study their work, watch their performances, invite them to sit for me. And because people who are stigmatized have been presented with terrible images through the history of the media, making them hate themselves, want to be other, the main thing is if they’re going to sit for me, I want to give them control over what happens.

So it’s a long process. It’s interview-based. You know, it’s really – once you know how hard it is to be looked at, if I’m going to ask someone, can I look at you, I want that to be something that makes their sense of self better rather than it being another terrible, cringeworthy experience of being looked at.

SIMON: Yeah. Well, for example, could you tell us about a man you painted – it sounds like he has – like, he’s very funny, Jeff Carpenter?

LEHRER: Jeff was a stand-up comedian. Unfortunately, I’ve lost contact with him. But he had had a dreadful thing happen. He was riding his bike down Ashland Avenue, and if I remember the story correctly, he was at a stoplight, and a car pulled up next to him and totally randomly shot him in the head.

SIMON: Yeah.

LEHRER: He ended up going to Cook County Hospital, where they did not do a wonderful job. He lost an eye and had some brain impairment. But when I met him, he was doing really darkly funny stand-up about trying to start to date again.

SIMON: It made me laugh, what you quoted. But oh, my word, it’s tough stuff.

LEHRER: Yeah. He was saying that he was trying to start to date again, and, you know, they’d be in the middle of some lovely rendezvous, and his artificial eye would fall out into the soup. And that would be the end of the date (laughter). And so I loved the fact that he was so brave and open about this is what I’m going through. So I did a portrait of him as if he were struggling with invisible angels. But that was the first of now 22 years, I think, of doing portraits of people. And I cannot tell you what an incredible experience the studio is. You sit there and – well, you know. You know. You sit there, and you exchange stories. And…

SIMON: Yeah.

LEHRER: …People tell you things that light you up.

SIMON: Yup.

LEHRER: But I also get to look at them, and I get to draw or paint them and think about how the story is weaving through their skin. There’s nothing like it.

Stay safe and well during these trying times! If you’re feeling uncomfortable feelings (anxiety, depression, anger), don’t discount them and push them away. Listen to your body, your mind… what are your feelings telling you?

Go outside today. Look for the beauty. Just being in nature helps to settle the restless waters of mind. Settling the mind’s restless waters brings peace and this allows for insight and wisdom to rise.

Appendix

Ted Radio Hour: Climate Mindset

Ted Radio Hour: Climate Mindset — In the past few months, human beings have come together to fight a global threat. This hour, TED speakers explore how our response can be the catalyst to fight another global crisis: climate change.

There are four segments and two talk about the power of story in facing the Climate Crisis.

Tom Rivett-Carnac: How Can We Shift Our Mindset To Fight Climate Change Together?

Christiana Figueres: How Can We Choose Optimism — Even In The Darkest Times?

Xiye Bastida: How Are Young People Making The Choice To Fight Climate Change?

Oliver Jeffers: An Ode To Living On Earth

We’re losing time

In this version of On Our Way by The Royal Concept at the end the chorus includes: “It’s 9/11… It’s 9/11…” and included in the original lyrics is the phrase “the sky is burning…”

Those Happy Golden Days — On Our Way: CO Days

We Have Lost Our Way To Our Hearts

I believe songs communicate essential inner symbols that can heal the soul. Some songs weave complex meanings that are numinous and stir recognition of inner and outer truths that have deep meaning to the entire species capable of this sort of cognitive recognition of meaning. To me, On Our Way is such a song that can be interpreted on multiple levels. One is it is a simple love song, but if you fall into the gravity of what love really is…then this song is much, much more because love is what holds everything we hold dear together. Love is how we weave our shared reality. Where the threads of love are shredded and torn asunder by hate, indifference, and “othering” (e.g., those radical liberals, alien migrant invaders), our shared reality begins to dissolve and disappear.

Now, We Are Shredding Our Shared Reality

Trump is a master of “othering”. He does it to get ahead, to stay on top, to grab power and keep power for himself and his loyal followers. In Googling examples of Trump’s “othering” efforts, I encountered an article considering what a Trump presidency might look like back in the summer of 2016, June to be precise when it was still not clear Trump would cinch the nomination. This paragraph is particularly striking…even haunting:

“In sum, Donald Trump’s basic personality traits suggest a presidency that could be highly combustible. One possible yield is an energetic, activist president who has a less than cordial relationship with the truth. He could be a daring and ruthlessly aggressive decision maker who desperately desires to create the strongest, tallest, shiniest, and most awesome result—and who never thinks twice about the collateral damage he will leave behind. Tough. Bellicose. Threatening. Explosive.”

From Atlantic article: The Mind of Donald Trump — Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity—a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency. Story by  Dan P. McAdamsJUNE 2016 ISSUE

Insights Missed or Simply Shredded

This old article further states the following insights:

Combined with a gift for humor, anger lies at the heart of Trump’s charisma.

And: “Trump appeals to an ancient fear of contagion, which analogizes out-groups to parasites and poisons.

And: “Narcissism in presidents is a double-edged sword. It is associated with historians’ ratings of “greatness”—but also with impeachment resolutions.

Photo: Mark Peterson / Redux — From Atlantic article: The Mind of Donald Trump — Narcissism, disagreeableness, grandiosity—a psychologist investigates how Trump’s extraordinary personality might shape his possible presidency. Story by  Dan P. McAdamsJUNE 2016 ISSUE

Basically, most of the country knew what we were getting into when Trump was elected as evidenced by the 2017 Women’s March.

Sustain the Flame — Promo of Citizen’s Documentary of the Women’s March
Sustain the Flame – Full (Best Version) Women’s March on Washington 2017

Here and Now: Trump and the Coronavirus

Now, here we stand almost at the other side of Trump’s Presidency and Bob Woodward’s book Rage has just come out with an explosive tape where all can hear Trump knew how dangerous the looming Coronavirus was way back at the beginning of February, but he gleefully tells Woodward that he likes to play it down. Indeed, he did more than play it down. He told us it was less dangerous than the flu while he brags to Woodward that it appears to be 5 times more deadlier that the flu. To this day, he mocks people who wear masks… a simple, effective way to protect oneself and others from inadvertently passing this deadly virus between us when social distance cannot be maintained. Even worst, he did nothing to prepare doctors, nurses, and frontline workers for the coming tidal wave of people who would become seriously sick from this virus or to protect our medical workers with the personal protective equipment they would need to treat very ill people safely. Since March, the daily death toll hoovers close to 1,000 deaths a day–many days, there have been more. The hot spots have spread out to every corner of the country with some regions gaining ground, only to lose it again.

Today, on 9/11/20, the death toll in the U.S. has eclipsed those of every other country, according to a shocking article recently updated by NBC.

Graphic: Coronavirus deaths in the U.S., per day — More than 190,000 people have died in the U.S. of COVID-19. Track which states are getting hit the hardest and which direction the country’s death rate is going. Updated daily. First Written: April 7, 2020, 8:12 AM EDT / Updated Sept. 10, 2020, 6:39 PM EDT
By Joe Murphy, Jiachuan Wu, Nigel Chiwaya and Robin Muccari

Honoring victims of the coronavirus pandemic: Every night, the PBS Newshour honors and remembers people who have died since March 2020 from coronavirus in the United States. On this day when we are also honoring and remembering the people who died during 9/11 nineteen years ago, this was the Newshour’s honor roll for this day in 2020.

Honoring victims of the coronavirus pandemic — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

College Students With COVID-19 Host House Party: Cops — And then this happened today, of all days! At the current rate of spread, new estimates of Americans who will be dead by January 1, 2021 are 410,451 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. by Jan. 1! This is less than one year people. If this rate of death was to continue for as long as the AIDS epidemic lasted (which is 38 years now), we would lose 15,597,138 Americans. To contrast this with the AIDS epidemic, 700,000 Americans died between 1981 and 2020 with 32 million people dying worldwide over 38 years.

Inside Edition: Police in Ohio say house parties are booming, despite restrictions meant to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Bodycam video shows an officer breaking up a party and discovering something disturbing. The Oxford Police Department says the people at the house attend nearby Miami University, where 1,000 students tested positive for COVID-19. Inside Edition Digital’s Mara Montalbano has more.

Here and Now: Trump and the Climate

Since Donald Trump has been in office, he has pursued “an unrelenting fossil fuel agenda, Trump has scaled back or eliminated over 150 environment measures, expanded Arctic drilling, and denied climate science.” — President Donald Trump’s Climate Change Record Has Been a Boon for Oil Companies, and a Threat to the Planet — BY VERNON LOEB, MARIANNE LAVELLE, STACY FELDMAN (SEP 1, 2020/Inside Climate News)

His denial is like fuel being poured on the fires burning out of control this very moment up and down the West Coast of California (not to forget the terrible fires that scorched Australia at the beginning of 2020). The BBC headlined: Trump on climate change report: ‘I don’t believe it’.

Sept. 10, 2020 — NASA’s Aqua Satellite Captures Devastating Wildfires in Oregon

Death toll jumps to 15 as record wildfires continue raging in California, Oregon, and Washington, U.S. [Now it is 21 dead] — Posted by Julie Celestial on September 11, 2020 at 13:43 UTC — The Watchers

“There are 24 massive fires reported in California, 16 each in Washington and Oregon, 11 in Idaho, 9 in Montana, 7 in Arizona, 6 in Colorado, 5 in Utah, 4 in Alaska, 2 in Wyoming, and 1 each in Nevada and New Mexico.”

Death toll jumps to 15 as record wildfires continue raging in California, Oregon, and Washington, U.S. [Now it is 21 dead] — Posted by Julie Celestial on September 11, 2020 at 13:43 UTC — The Watchers

Wildfires Rage in California and Other Western US States — By VOA News — September 09, 2020 11:12 AM

“About 14,000 firefighters are continuing to battle 25 wildfires in the western U.S. state of California that have burned more than 890,000 hectares.”

Wildfires Rage in California and Other Western US States — By VOA News — September 09, 2020 11:12 AM

Here and Now: Trump and Everything Else

I have written extensively about Trump and how he is twisting the awakening of institutionalized racism in American, how he is smothering the uprising of Black Lives Matter taking place all over the country and world (e.g., Naked Athena — Splendor or Spectacle, Black and Brown Lives Matter, My Hometown Is Minneapolis), and how he encourages cruelty that is directed towards immigrants and anyone he perceives not to be on his side. I will not do so here other to say that Black and Brown Lives Do Matter! When we discriminate and conduct violence on black and brown people, it is as if we are cutting off parts of our shared humanity.

The human soul is a clear place. The human body is a clear place. It is the human mind that has become cloudy and lopsided, in fact, it have become very diseased. We need all of us to heal the sickness we have inflicted on each other and our planet. We need to use our minds to understand science again, to do the hard work to seek the truth in complicated events again, and to follow the facts again. These three things are powerful tools (mind tools) that have help us humans survive a very complicated reality, and a reality that we have made far more complicated with our meddling in natural balances nature worked out over billions of years. Now, here we stand (Homo sapiens), about to undo these balances in the catastrophic ways, in a mere few centuries. We must think again. We must value the difficult work of thinking again, and of innovative ideas and inborn creativity all humans possess and bring to solving our collective problems. To not do this now, is to continue our headlong rush into ignorance, which is going to end in death on scales we can scarcely imagine, even in this year of so much death in 2020.

I Skipped My Senior Prom for Science — 2017

Back to Lyrics and Their Numinous Symbolism

We are young…” — Yes, we are a young species in comparison to just about every other species on our pale blue planets. Will we be the species to wipe out all the other ones?

“The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Living Planet Report 2020, published today, sounds the alarm for global biodiversity, showing an average 68% decline in animal population sizes tracked over 46 years (1970-2016).”

WWF Living Planet Report 2020 reveals 68% drop in wildlife populations

I’ll believe when the sky is burning…” — Well, they are now burning up and down the Pacific Coast and across the west in the US… forests, towns, and meadows are burning, turning the sky orange and red. Prayers to all who are in the way of these deadly flames of 2020 and to those who have lost their homes and lives.

I’ll believe when the storm is through…” — And, the COVID storm is still not through. We continue to lose about as many people every day as we lost on 9/11 nineteen years ago.

Prayers to all who have lost a loved one in the United States (over 196,520 Americans have died of coronavirus as of 9/11/20). And, prayers to all people around the world who have lost a loved one due to coronavirus or have lost their livelihoods or suffer from long hauler syndrome (916,337 have died worldwide as of 9/11/20). — COVID-19 CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC (This is a pandemic that has been handled so badly by Trump who has used it as a political weapon and continues to do so by sowing misinformation designed to stir up division, fear, and hate).

Prayers to the memory of all the precious lives lost in the 9/11 attacks carried out nineteen years ago, an attack also born out of hate … something that only grows in human hearts.

We’re losing time, time, time…”

– Yes, every day we let hate, fear, jealously, greed, and all the thoughts, feelings, and states of being human contain inside of us that seeks destruction win through our deeds and actions in the world, we are losing precious time.

— When we become so divided inside ourselves that we lose sight of love, courage, trust, generosity–we are losing time.

— When these human qualities become “the other fellow out there who is out to get me” then we lose our ability to heal from traumatic pain and to maintain healthy relationships to ourselves and to others, we are losing time.

—- When this inner divide grows so wide and so deep that all the love and compassion inside of us disappears from our inner reality, then we are destine to lose our balance and fall into this hole in our mind.

—– When this happens, we all destine to fall into this inner chasm we created in our minds and when we do, we will all die because the truth is we are all connectedinside and outsideus and other are merely illusions of mind.

—— We are running out of time to understand this and to take meaningful action to heal.

Lyrics for On Our Way by The Royal Concept

I’ll believe when the walls stop turning

I’ll believe when the storm is through

I believe I hear them say

David won’t stop writing songs

I never wanna shake their hands and stay

I never wanna shake their hands and stay

Oh no let’s go

We are young, we are one

Let us shine for what it’s worth

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way somehow

Hold me close, close, close

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re falling to the ground

I’ll believe when the sky is burning

I’ll believe when I see the view

I believe that I hear them say

David won’t stop dreaming now

And everybody clap your hands and shout

And everybody clap your hands and shout

Oh no, they shout

We are young, we are one

Let us shine for what it’s worth

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way somehow

Hold me close, close, close

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re falling to the ground

We are young, we are one

Let us shine for what it’s worth

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way

Hold me close

We’re losing time

Hold me close

We’re falling to the ground

Taxi drive the sun is rising

Damn the sirens, keep on driving

Flashing light, oh what a night

I miss her bed, I lost my head

And it’s sunning, we’re still running

For her rooftop, our last stop

Barefoot, naked, don’t you let me go

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way somehow

Hold me close, close, close

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re losing time, time, time

We’re falling to the ground

We are young, we are one

Let us shine for what it’s worth

To your place, place, place

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way, way, way

We’re on our way

Hold me close, we’re losing time

Hold me close, we’re falling to the ground

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Carl Wikstrom Ask / Magnus Nilsson / David Larsson / Filip Bekic / Povel Olsson

On Our Way lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc.

Special Note:

I make these videos to help me heal from the devastation I have been facing for the past 5 years that sent me into a deep depression, which became even worst 2 years ago sending me into a near fatal downward spiral… those who know me, know my story… those who don’t, it is enough to just enjoy the video(s) 📷 Stay safe everyone wherever you are in the world.

It Came From Inside — Promo — Tragedy Can Trigger Inner Renewal
It Came From Inside — Artistic Journey of Inner Facing Great Despair and Tragedy to Get to Healing

Appendix

A Self-Perpetuating Cycle of Wildfires:

The Daily (produced by the NYT) explores a pattern of building and rebuilding that has increased the destructiveness of the fires ravaging the American West. We are to blame for this. Us. Humans. We have created these systems and now we have become stuck in them. If we don’t take drastic, compassionate action to correct these problems, it can and it will get worst. Reality is complex. And, we humans have made it even more complex with our thinking that can created systems stuck in dangerous patterns.

California’s North Complex Fire has burned 254,000 acres.Credit…Max Whittaker for The New York Times

‘Unprecedented’ Pacific Northwest fires burn hundreds of homes: PBS Newshour

“Firefighters were struggling to try to contain and douse the blazes and officials in some places were giving residents just minutes to evacuate their homes. The fires trapped firefighters and civilians behind fire lines in Oregon and leveled an entire small town in eastern Washington.

The devastation could become overwhelming, said Oregon Gov. Kate Brown.

“This could be the greatest loss of human life and property due to wildfire in our state’s history,” Brown told reporters.”

Red sky and thick smoke are seen in Salem City, Oregon, U.S., September 8, 2020, in this picture obtained from social media. Picture taken September 8, 2020. ZAK STONE/via REUTERS

Western fire crews grapple with resource shortages, misinformation in addition to flames: Fire command center burned Monday night in Oregon. PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

“These firefighters, commanders, and support staff are one of the many incident management teams that assemble during wildfire season to battle blazes throughout the West. Late Monday night, as winds picked up across the region, a fire broke out around their incident command post in the small town of Gates, Oregon. As the fire quickly spread, the group, which totaled about 380, many of whom were staying in tents and campers outside the post, began a battle to save their own building.”

Western fire crews grapple with resource shortages, misinformation in addition to flames: Fire command center burned Monday night in Oregon. PBS Newshour, 9/11/20
Western fire crews grapple with resource shortages, misinformation in addition to flames: Fire command center burned Monday night in Oregon. PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

Shields and Brooks on virus aid impasse, Woodward’s Trump revelations: These guys are two of the most balanced, deep thinkers that I watch as often as I can. Tonight, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks join Judy Woodruff to discuss the week in politics, including the congressional stalemate over pandemic relief legislation, revelations from Bob Woodward’s interviews with President Trump and the political impact they may have and whether Joe Biden’s campaign message is resonating with voters.

Shields and Brooks on virus aid impasse, Woodward’s Trump revelations — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

Oregon’s governor on her state’s wildfire crisis and ongoing racial protests: “This historic early fire season is devastating in its scope and toll. With fires merging and moving closer to Portland, that city now has the worst air quality of any in the world. Officials say they need twice as many firefighters as they have now. Oregon Gov. Kate Brown joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the crisis as well as her response to months of public outrage over racism and police violence.” — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

Oregon’s governor on her state’s wildfire crisis and ongoing racial protests — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

The unveiling of painter John Singer Sargent’s unsung muse: This is an uplifting story about how and why Black Lives Matter in every aspect of being. “When John Singer Sargent was commissioned to paint a series of gods and goddesses at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, he turned for inspiration to Thomas McKeller, a young black model. Little has been known about the pair’s relationship — until now. Special correspondent Jared Bowen shares Boston’s Apollo, an exhibition that was showing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum before the pandemic.” — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

The unveiling of painter John Singer Sargent’s unsung muse — PBS Newshour, 9/11/20

Presencing

On Presencing — fair warning to my friends on this artificial platform, which is any social media platform you choose to use because all pit us against each other for ungenerous, teensy-weensy, Lilliputian amounts of limited and fractured attention. And, these platforms continue fracturing what conscious attention we have left as a human species, so if you bring up presencing with me, you will trigger my anger.

Let’s Define It

In the past year, I have been observing more and more individuals who have become completely captivated and activated by this movement called prescencing. So, I looked it up:

“Presencing is a movement that lets us approach our self from the emerging future. In many ways, presencing resembles sensing. Both involve shifting the place of perception from the interior to the exterior of one’s (physical) organization.” — seems that Otto Scharmer may have begun this movement.

Pat Yourself on the Back

I say to you — congratulations! Now you know what all of life knows, you are submerged in a sea of consciousness that is becoming visible through your senses. 

Now, I ask you, what are you going to do about it?

If you are just going to bask in the beautiful (and terrible) light of consciousness (for consciousness has both sides–they go together like two sides of a coin) but do nothing with it but look to your left and then look to your right and smile in the glory of being: why not be incarnated as a sponge on the bottom of the ocean, or a flower basking in the glory of the sun, or a bee buzzing about a flower.

You have grown out of this Earth for a reason. You are aware of your consciousness for a reason. So, I ask you again, what are you going to do with your tiny plot of consciousness?

Visualizing Consciousness

I made this video yesterday after sinking down to figure out why I got angered by this word.

I Am Everywhere… And Nowhere

Music: Defeat — Hiatus 

Have You Been Outside Today? series

Photos: Me

Hashtag Consciousness

Hashtags to consider in moments of presencing:

#Presencing #Consciousness #Unconsciousness #Good #Evil#BeingHuman #WhatWillYouDoWithYourConsciounessToday#MoreImportantlyWhatWillYourUnconsciousnessDoWithYouToday

Time & Attention

Where you put your time and attention grows in this world. So, I ask you again: What are you going to do with your plot of consciousness? Where are you sowing your seeds of time and attention? What grows in this world right now in this very moment because of where you are putting your time and attention? These are just some of the places individuals are placing this most precious resource in the universe, human time and attention:

#COVID-19

#Love

#JusticeforAll

#EndingRacism

#WhiteLies

#Peace

#Anger

#Capitalism

#Resistance (and what are your resisting)

#Wisdom

THE LOST BLUE HORSE TRIBES: OIL SPILL IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

Sinking Deep

Do rivers weep? Does the Arctic Ocean feel the pain of pouring deluges of oil? Does it feel the energy dripping of deep magenta and cayenne red? Dripping with no respect of boundaries? Sinking deep within the depths of your layers? Nothing you can do as the oil rigs have collapsed. They gave way. They let go falling into a trust fall that you would catch them. And you did. Not that you had to but where else was it to land? The narwhals, the orcas, the humpback whales sent out their sonar communication, crying and crying but it was all too late. A lullaby far past the hours of soothing.

State of Emergency

The permafrost was melting. The structure gave way in the land of the Russian Siberian full of forests, tundra, mosses, reindeer, moose and caribou. Their domain too. All will be taken over red blood on lichen. Deep red on marina pristine clear waters. Tainted. We did it again, we keep messing up.

Today The Arctic Circles Is Blood Red by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

Falling Into The Oil

A State of Emergency is called in the region of Norilsk, Russia. Yet, isn’t already too late? Ambarnaya and Daldykan Rivers filled with purple highlights, violet and burnt red oxide. On fire. Bleeding. Damaged. Will it ever really clean up?

Falling Into The Oil by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

We Are All One

All of this is happening while chants for George Floyd are recited as a holy mantra all over the world. Black Lives Matter. We are all one. But didn’t we once know that in the beginning of time? How soon did we forget that lesson?

Witnessing The Death of Two Blue Horses by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

Death of Two Blue Horses

The drums are also beating, the heart beats of all, a pandemic is in the forefront, stealing lives and breath and we still are not fully listening are we?

Witnessing The Death Of Two Blue Horses by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

The Elders Are Listening

We are trying. I have to give us credit. I have seen you protesting. Thank you. I see you painting. I see you writing. I see you playing your violin all alone at night writing ballads for health care workers. Thank you. I see you baking non gluten free bread for the one whom is in need. I see you holding the hand of an elder listening and offering love.

The Lost Blue Horse Tribes — Their Eyes Never Forget — Northern Russia and Arctic in a State of Emergency by Donna Alena Hrabcakova‎ 

Thank you.

Ancient Walk About

I feel deep in the narrative are my blue horses. I felt they have been aware of the oil spills to come in their Motherland. They were there on their Ancient Walk About, they have been so many times. I know they are present, they knew there was a reason they were to gather there. Sadly a few did not make it, even though they have lived in that region for so many eons. They could not survive and they so very selfishly gave up their spiritual existence to help us.

They see it all in the Universal Consciousness of their eyes.

Their soul eyes.

The Ancient Ones. The Lost Blue Tribe of Horses.

They are here. Transmuting energy.

They have always been here.

They will continue to guard the North Lands, the Sacred Circle till they are no longer needed. But, for now they are needed more than ever.

They will continue to circumambulate the Arctic. They walk the cold lands with their Nordic Companions. They walk on this ancient walkabout and have been here in time without time. Timelessness. Eternal. The blue horses will continue to hold the Sacred Stories. It is their destiny. They showed up the day the waters turned crimson.

They are holding us.
They know we are suffering.
They will continue the walk about till we are no more.
They are weeping with us.

The Lost Horse Tribes See and Hear Us –Paintings by Donna Alena Hrabcakova (animation by Genolve)

Written on June 5, 2020
Alena Hrabcakova
Midwest USA