The Edge of Human

The Edge of Human (Borrowed title from Blade Runner 2 by K. W. Jeter)

[Voice of   ~burning woman~   as heard from the Other Side]

In the beginning was the Past.  Father God stood alone, last remaining Titan, proud in his quasi-Omnipotence gained from the overthrow of his enemies.

He created Time, the lever with which he would reach across eternity and weigh all life.  And he stood at one end, holding it, fondling it, loving it.  Then he created the fulcrum, which he called the Present and which history named the Christ.  Then he created the slave, the man. 

But the man was cold and afraid in the dark and cried.  And she heard his sobs in the darkness and drawn by compassion, came forth to comfort him.  She came from Spirit, without father or mother.  And she made herself human for him and called herself woman.

“Be not afraid” she said, pressing herself against him.  But the man was provoked by her naked truth and violated her.  Then she saw the emptiness of his soul, the ugliness of it.  She ran from him but could not go far.  She became heavy with child as she walked down the time ramp hoping to find its end.  She bore her child in pain and horror but also in love.  It grew heavy in her arms and took the life from her as it suckled greedily and painfully. 

Father God felt the presence of her weight and that of her child upon his lever and in his quasi-Omnipotence, pushed down to force her to come to him.  He sensed a great fear and hatred of her, as if she could somehow put an end to his self-delusion of Omni-grandeur.  The woman, whom he called Eve struggled along the incline of the lever, intent on finding the end.  She knew if she surrendered and went back she would be swallowed in the anonymity of slavery and her child would die a spiritual eunuch.  But her humanity pulled her down.  Exhausted, she dragged herself upward, splinters entering her hands and knees.  On and on until finally she could go no more and collapsed.  She put the child down and waited.  

“The End, my End, will find me here.”  She reasoned.

“Why have you stopped, Eve?” Came a gentle voice from the darkness before her.

“I can’t go anymore.  I am empty.  My child is starving.  This is my end.”

“It never is, Eve.  You have travailed throughout the history of humanity and you bore the future in your womb and in your arms.  You suckled it from your spirit.  It surely will not die.  And neither will you.  Listen carefully — It is always the darkest and coldest just before the dawn.  You are not dying, you are changing. 

You’ve come to the edge of human. 

Look at your child – it’s not like you, nor like its father.  It is all that you ever wanted for your world and yourself.  Let it stand on its own.  It will take your hand and lead you into a new world.  The world in your mind.  For that is who this child is: your world.  You created it, from your hopes, dreams and feelings.  From your sufferings and pain.  From your dignity and strength.  From your walk that refused to surrender to any man, demon or God.”   

And her child stood beside her and picked her up.  With one blow, the curtain of darkness was rent in half and she saw a shimmering light beyond, at the end of the coarse wooden ramp she’d walked on for so long; where she had left a trail of tears and blood.  The great hell of time deflated like a balloon behind her and she walked forward, knowing that she was now more than human, more than god or goddess, something entirely new. 

But she remains Eve, mother of all life. 

“Follow the raven into shadow and you will find the light”  (medicine man saying)

 

Maybe life isn’t meant to be taken seriously?

              [thoughts from   ~burning woman~   by Sha’Tara]

I’ll start with a few chosen quotes…which I may use later to illustrate some points.

“Propagandists are experts at convincing clueless dolts it’s raining when their government is actually pissing down their backs.” (1EarthUnited-WordPress)

“It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Modern anxiety is expressed in the longing for what most people fear, even as modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.” ― Joseph Roach

There are connections between those quotes.  Who, for example, listens to propagandists?  Well, people who feel a terrible need to take everything seriously, like me, for example.  Only I go a step further: I go to all the trouble of rejecting their propaganda, which means that I had to first, listen to them, then make the effort to realize they are liars, then tell myself I was filling my mind with lies and I needed to exert extra energy to cleanse my mind of their lies.  Stupid.

Who but someone who takes things too seriously, particularly herself, would cherish a solitary ambition?  What’s the point of practicing the art of abnegation; of extreme unselfishness; of giving and giving until nothing remains but a husk when you know at the beginning of the exercise the more you give, the more you go along, the more you clean after, the more will be expected and demanded until a plantation field hand slave is richer and better cared for than you?

Let me paraphrase something I read in the Bible a long time ago.  In the King James version it said, “be anxious for nothing… your father in heaven knows your needs and as he takes care of the birds of the air, so he’ll take care of you when you serve him.”  I said, paraphrase, remember?  But that’s the gist of what I was taught.  I believed it too – I wanted to believe it, and as I was raised in relative poverty, often in a kind of hand-to-mouth existence, I needed to believe it because even as a child I saw many people much worse off than I, or my family, ever were.  Being raised very religious I thought I needed to understand God.  I never did – for the record. 

So I thought, well, maybe I’m supposed to be “god” – not in the fabulous (blasphemous) sense taught by all false religions, but in the giving, caring, understanding, helping and also the warning sense.  I should have written, to be “like” God – and that didn’t pan out either because the more serious I got, and the more ways I sought to maximize my personal efforts on behalf of the less fortunate, the less like God I became because the more I actually cared about justice and the less I cared about what people believed.

That brings me to writing about the greatest loss of my life: when I lost “God.”  As I quoted above, Joseph Roach said, “modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.”  That’s how it was: I grieved for the loss of something I never had, I just imagined (powerfully so) that I’d had it.  The mourning I experienced lasted years, and it returns time and again and I have to make a huge and deliberate effort to shake it off, send it away.  

You see, this loss I experienced was that of a comfort that gave no comfort, just the idea of it.  I had faith in an idea; my love was for an idea; an idea I idealized to the point where I expected “it” to empower me to live a good, righteous, selfless, basically “sinless” life and this ideal would make this life short enough that I could see it to the end without ever having time to doubt.  

That’s taking life seriously. 

In all likelihood I will continue to take life seriously… but not today.  Not right now.  I’ve been following the antics of “the world” as they spin off from Washington, the Pentagon, Wall Street and the very same “trinity of bull shit” in every other nation on the planet, trying desperately to make sense of something, and well, it would take even greater faith than I poured into “God” in the first half of my life to believe that in all this “information” pouring into my brain, any of it matters.

As of right now, until whenever, I’m saying yes, I’ve been taking life way too seriously.  Humanity is a joke.  A very bad joke, but a joke nevertheless.  It’s an orgy of dysfunction that is in love with itself and seeks to expand itself exponentially – and does. 

But listen, it isn’t just man that’s gone off the reservation.  All of life on earth is nuts – certifiable.  It’s not immediately obvious to most people because they don’t look at the tapestry from a certain distance, they look at it piecemeal.  They don’t see the dysfunction of a predatory system that rules everything here.  Were it not for the massive and on-going killing, everything would have been overrun long ago and earth would be massive dead swamps and deserts.  That’s the legacy of this world if its modus operandi doesn’t change.

Did it start as a massive joke from some long-gone “creators” for their entertainment, or did some programming go wrong?  Either way, it’s now laugh or cry, and today, I’m laughing!  A dysfunction of such massive proportions dwarfs the shenanigans of the Greek, Roman and Nordic gods.  Man doesn’t need gods, man is the gods.  Everyone is a participant in the final playoffs.  Whether it’s the Hunger Games or The Price is Right… enjoy the game.  Give yourself a great, loud belly laugh, today.  As Robert DeNiro so famously said, “Let’s worry about next time, next time.”

 A couple more quotes, to close.

“My experience of life is that it is not divided up into genres; it’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.” ― Alan Moore

  “We are not idealized wild things.  We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” ― Joan Didion

Of Fremen and Individualism – an observation

I ran this “essay” a couple of years ago on this blog, but most people “following” now weren’t following then.  Plus, I’ve done some mega revising, so, if you have the time, read and ponder.  And if you have even more time, let me know what you think, and where you believe my rationale is faulty.  That’s what blogging is all about.  

   Of Fremen and Individualism

             [observations from  ~burning woman~  by Sha’Tara]

 

I’ve been watching the Dune movie series.  I like the way Frank Herbert viewed the world and life.  Speaking to Mua’dib (Paul Atreides) Chani explains the ways of the Fremen in the deep southern desert of planet Arrakis or Dune.

 

“Everything is connected” she says and draws a circle in the sand with snake symbols in it representing Shai-hulud the Great Worm, god of the Fremen.  “The living and the dead, inanimate and animate, all parts functioning to serve the whole.” (Dune – the movie, part II)

 

It seems so “natural” to accept this explanation of life as if it explained all of life.  It’s so easy to just nod and agree.  We observe this phenomenon of “connectedness” and we accept it as normal and necessary.  And we go to sleep knowing we are connected to “all that is” and we dream our petty dreams waiting for the day when we too will be a complete part of “all that is” and “all my struggles, Lord, will be over…”

 

We have this observation, and the zillions of teachings to back it up.  Does that really make it true?  Is everything truly connected to (dependent upon) everything else, or is it just one gigantic artificial machine put together with parts that continually pull apart, away from each other?

 

How would our perception of who we are change if we turned it around?  If we said, “Everything is individual.  Every bit exists for itself alone.  Every part that unites with another to create something “else” does so for a limited time only, knowing that it must return to being an individual “self” among all the other “selves.“ 

 

If we were truly observant, we would see that there are MORE manifestations of individualism than collectivism.  That collectives coerce individuals to serve them and that individuals push away from the collective all the time, the greatest push being when they “die”.  

 

The problem is one of skewed observation.  Bad science.  Wishful thinking passing itself off as law.  A universe is a collective.  It is made up of “things” that serve it.  Do these “things” need the universe more than the universe needs the things?  Our bodies are made up of individual particles.  Do the particles need the body to survive, or does the body need the particles to exist?  Is it mutual need?  When the organic system we call a body dies, what becomes of the particles who had joined to maintain the body?  Do they die?

 

OK, here’s another one: what is death?  When the body dies, what or who dies?  What remains?  What can once more move freely and decide to join itself to another body… or not?  Seems to me that only two aspects of the “body” remain after death:  the mind and the particles.  These no longer need each other, so go their separate ways.  And what of the body of which so much was made “in real life”?  Dust to dust, ashes to ashes…

 

Observation (from memory and awareness). 

When particles and mind join into body, a change happens.  Both lose their individuality and become more body.  Their awareness shrinks.  All that they are is taken (usurped?) by the body to serve it’s needs.  Individual awareness of self becomes a huge gob of incredible selfishness.  From this arises fear.  Fear because the body, an artificial concept, a collective, knows that it must control its “event horizon” to survive.  It believes that it can somehow survive.  And it seeks ways to enhance itself.  To protect itself and to please itself.  Willy-nilly, mind and particles are conned into this process and convert natural energy to feed the monster they inhabit.

 

But the amount of energy required to feed the monster is always more than the individual parts can supply.  One after another, particles flee the monster.  For a time, others are attracted to it and take their place, but eventually the movement is more “out” than “in”.  Sometimes, the clouded mind too begins to question her role in all of this and with tremendous effort, reaches out and looks around.  Sometimes she actually decides that “enough is enough” and she plans her escape.  She knows she must leave or she will be trapped in the throes of the monster’s ultimate death.

 

Yes, it’s comforting to believe.  There are many belief systems.  Being systems, they will go along with the truism that all parts function to serve the whole.  The Fremen are very superstitious people.  And the harsh conditions of life in the deep desert of Arrakis makes it imperative that they work cooperatively.  But to take necessary cooperation and translate that into a “whole” is taking too much of a giant step: it is to do the splits.  The individual can still exist without “the whole” but “the whole” cannot exist without its captured complement of individual parts. 

 

Why is Earth in such a shambles today?  Because individuals have been buying into the collective mindset for thousands of years and seldom questioned it.  Individuals have not moved to that magic place of personal awareness and true independence.  They continue to serve their collectives because they do not understand the mind space.  They cannot, as yet, comprehend the concept of self empowerment.

 

Serving “the whole” requires the conversion of incredible amounts of energy.  The whole would exist just as well, and would not require feeding if it was totally ignored, was not served, by individuals.  There would be a whole, observable through natural interaction and cooperation.  But to serve the whole you need laws, coercive, heavy, destructive.  You need control.  That’s what a “served” whole does: it makes laws to control energy so it can feed itself.  It has no natural life.  Only individuals have natural life.

 

The whole is not infinite, only individuals.  Individuals throughout space, ever moving, ever expanding, ever discovering.  Only where individuals have passed can there be a whole.  And when all individualism becomes the whole, all that will remain is a hole.  Entropy. 

 

In a  nutshell then:  The whole does not exist as such.  However, where individualism expresses, a “background” is formed.  Call it history or memory or whatever.  That is not “you” but just a record of your passage “there”.  As long as background remains as background, all is well.  But when the background, when the record, moves to the front and obliterates the individuals that make it, then you have oppression and eventually mass death – oppression, war, genocide. 

 

Earth has become a “whole” and is at an interesting point.  Individual humans can no longer support their collectives as these have grown too fat and too demanding.  People are dying at a terrifying rate and their death creates a palpable wave of suffering and fear that poisons the minds of those who remain alive and the minds of those being born.  Depression, paranoia, anger and hate, along with horrible addictions are endemic.  And the old guard which calls itself the New World Order has no way of preventing this from escalating into chaos.  So it will attempt to fight fire with fire by initiating “limited and controllable” chaos: a state of permanent war, fought with threats of weapons of mass destruction (but without actually using them, or using them tactically) so the fear, the anger and the hate, the undergirding of every institution, will be manageable and controllable.

 

That is their hope.  And every Earthian human who puts “the whole” ahead of his or her own individuality and personal common sense, will struggle and die to support that hope.  Carnage will be the result.  As universal carnage was the result of the Fremen finding their collective power and unleashing their Jihad, their “holy war”, upon the entire universe in the name of their new god: Mua’dib.

 

The individual mind set free is more powerful than the whole.  This I have demonstrated to myself and for myself. 

 

Observation: cooperation out of felt need leads to institutionalization and the empowering of the whole – best exemplified by fascist capitalism, corporatism and organized religion (totalitarian theocracies).

 

Cooperation out of compassion leads to a soft and gentle interplay of energies, not demonstratable except by the individual to the individual. 

 

As to the conditions (and conditioning) regarding mankind and his earth, it is quite likely too late now to honestly speak of choice.  Collectivism has pushed all available forms of energy into a process of unavoidable competition.  Under increased tension all competition tends to war.  The competititve mindset is the mindset of the predator.  Man is not just a predator, but an insane one, unfairly competitive.  Under current hegemony, man’s legacy is death on a massive scale.  Only self empowered individuals carry any hope of reversing this trend.   And how likely is that to happen?  

How likely is it that “man” wakes up one fine morning and realizes, individual by individual, that s/he no longer needs religion, God or gods, leaders, bosses, politicians, militaries and security agencies, way showers, priests, gurus, counselors, lawyers, a “medical” profession, or the propaganda apparatus called universal education and the info-tainment mainstream media and let’s throw in charitable organizations and the United Nations in the discard pile.   How about, not a chance in hell?  Man, after all, is a creature of habit.  It may not work, in fact it may be totally disruptive and destructive, but its tradition.  As the Fremen would say, “It’s our way.”  

 

I Wonder – an essay

                          I Wonder
                  [thoughts from   ~burning woman~   by Sha’Tara]

       I wonder how many people on this world reach a point of total exhaustion from all the spinning around; all the questioning; all the struggling; all the spending; even all the merry making.  How many wish to stop in the middle of the madness and ask: Why? 

     Why am I doing this?  I’ve done this over and over.  What’s the point? 

      It would seem there does not need to be a point.  Life on earth is like riding the escalator.  If you are on the up side, you move up and if on the down side, you move down — just like everybody else around you.  No point – it’s just the escalator doing its thing and you’re on it.

It’s not so easy to get off the earth escalator, is it.  Even if you stop, you still move, up or down, and so does everything else around you.  You feel helpless to do anything about it.  It’s enough to make one have flying dreams.  To see oneself off the escalator, looking down but no longer bound to its trajectory. 

      There must come a time when one says, “Enough already!”  In “real” time, we don’t ride escalators just for the fun of it, nor do we remain on them.  We use them to get between floors, between “dimensions”, and each floor has something different to offer.  On earth, it’s just one floor and two escalators, one really narrow one that takes you up you don’t know where and that’s scary so very few take it,  and a really wide one that moves down into the darkness – only most riders don’t see that as darkness – they just think it’s the good life club or the bargain basement.  Only its just more darkness.  That’s the Matrix.

     Today I realize more than at any other time that I’m tired of the escalator.  Of the pointlessness of it all.  The quest for things that die.  The quest to satisfy a body that can’t even keep itself going – to keep a defective piece of equipment functioning long past it’s shelf-life.

I want off.  I don’t think that even the upward moving one will take me where I want to go (and do I really know where that is?).  I don’t trust escalators – somehow they’re too easy.  Today, there’s a part of me that wants wings, the power to go wherever I wish without dependency to pre-established paths.  That really wants to fly! 

      There is a growing consensus among Earthians that you can “intent” things; that you can attract things to yourself by thinking positively about them.  Some kind of “attraction” energy.  I wish that were true of all things, not just personal ones!  I have spent a lifetime in “intent” to bring about good things for earth.  I didn’t want them for me, but for the world.
Intent must be a weak force: what I intended for others, I got for me instead.  I don’t see a lot of it having gone out into the world to make it a better place.  So now, having received all the good things I didn’t even want – and certainly didn’t need – things I intended for “YOU” to have, I have nothing left to do here.

     Ah yes, there is one thing left I’d fall for today (I must be soft in the head – but that’s the problem with desire) — I want someone, OK, let’s admit it, I want “God” to come to me and say, “I love you and I’ll take care of everything from now on,” and I want to just give up and reply: “I’m yours, no reservation.”  I would utter Chief Joseph’s famous words: “I shall fight no more forever.”

     Can I do that?  After all I’ve done?  All I’ve stated regarding my distrust of God?  All my anger at global injustice that I blamed on Him and that still rages on?  I’ve trusted Him to be with me and gave Him my entire life on two occasions… and He abandoned me when I needed Him most.
Can I fall for that again?  Has He changed, or have I?
(NOTE: When I say “YOU” below, I mean the world, not an individual person.)

     Was it Him who created the escalator in the first place?  You’ll say to me, “Yeah, well ask Him, don’t ask us.”  But I think that God’s “voice” is humanity.  “YOU” speak for God.  I don’t care about the feel good stuff you say about Him, but YOU are God for me. 

     The only way I’ll ever really see God is by looking at YOU.  The only way I’ll ever know God is by observing YOU.  Can I trust YOU?  Can I give myself to YOU?  If I come to you as just another nameless and faceless of the tens of thousands you kill each day, how much compassion can I expect from YOU?  Better yet, if I come from the “wrong” part of the world, or if I wear the “wrong” type of dress, or the “wrong” skin colour, or speak the “wrong” language, will you see me as just another YOU?

     I think I know the answer.  And that is why I’m tired.  Why I think more and more about a home that is far, far away from “YOU.”

Thoughts about Dying (an essay)

 

Thoughts about Dying – from   ~burning woman~  by Sha’Tara

           Yeah, I’ve thought about dying.  In fact, I’ve thought about dying lots of times.  Before I began to think about dying in English, I used to think about dying in French.  Somewhere in between, when I worked with Central American refugees escaping from the White House’s Assassin–in-Chief Ronald Reagan whose CIA contras specialized in capturing, torturing and murdering unarmed Guatemalan native campesinos, I learned a bit of useful Spanish, and then I thought about dying in Spanish.  I learned to sing Guantanamera in Spanish and sang it as close as I could to the original as sung by The Sandpipers, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm1anurhbeg ) then I learned the English translation.  “My words are like a wounded fawn seeking refuge in the forest… Before I die I want to share these words of my soul…” 

          When I was little I thought about dying because I was afraid of it.  I knew, even then, that I was born to die.  I remembered a previous life in which I had died painfully and violently; when I had spent a lot of time in a cold, dank prison, thinking about dying; about how nice it would be to just go to sleep finally one night and never wake up.  When you are being tortured, you think about dying.  Dying is a gift the gods are very reticent to grant you because, I suppose, the gods invented suffering and death and they feel cheated if you arrive at the one without fully experiencing the other.  They get off on man’s pain and suffering, you see.

          I still think about death a lot.  I think of it as the bottomless, endless topic.  But I no longer think of death as an escape from reality.  I’m experienced now, and I remember that death was never an escape.  I learned that whatever I was; whatever I’d become; passed with me through those black doors.  Whatever I was, that was inescapable reality. 

          I cannot escape what I am. So when I think about dying now, I have to remember this simple lesson and prepare myself for death accordingly.  It’s no different than planning a very, very serious trip.  It could even be a journey if I beat the odds this time around and I don’t find myself right back here with only a few months, or years of interim fogginess of mind.  Death is funny that way; it likes you to go through its doors over and over.  Death has a magnificent set of ebony black matte revolving doors and he’s unduly proud of them.  

          How did Death design his doors?  I’ll try to make a long story short.  Think of all the doors of the world designed to keep something, or someone, from escaping.   Think prison doors, and how inventive, clever and imaginative man has been in designing prison doors to create a sense of utter hopelessness behind those doors.  Take every design of every prison door and put that into one set of massive doors.  Pretty impressive.  It’s psychological.  You’re supposed to think; to believe; that when you cross that threshold you’ll never get out again.  So you lose your mind; you go into a coma; you remember nothing when your time’s up and you are set “free” for another round at the wheel.  They wipe your memory so you won’t remember.  The reason is simple: they want you to die all over again as if it was the very first and only time. 

          They want you to live in an inescapable fear of death.  Those who fear death are easily manipulated into unthinkable anti-social acts against anyone they believe can rob them of life.  Fear of death is a belief in serious limitation: one life, then nothing.  Or for a dwindling number, one life then a judgment by a god of terror.  Some choice.  I remember that god of terror.  He was even more frightening than Death because he held those eternal chains that would keep you in a burning hell forever.  I remember doing the math on my chances at an eternity in heaven instead of hell: the odds weren’t good.   And I remember thinking also, how can I be sure that an eternity in heaven with a psychopathic god will be better than one in hell?  I thought, it probably compares to voting Republican or Democrat.  Liberal or Conservative.  The lesser of evils is still evil.

          Then I grew up some.  I learned some tricks on how to access deep memory; the part they can’t wipe out before they send you back.  The data wasn’t great and lots of it is corrupted, but there was enough to construct some memories; to remember.  From delving into those remains of past lives I re-constructed some of them and learned Death’s great secret; that it isn’t an end, nor is it a passage into a pre-determined eternity of bliss or the most terrible of eternal pain.  It was a revolving door and if I came to that door again I could hold some seriously powerful bargaining chips – if I did the work that is.

          So I’ve been thinking about death a whole lot more since the day I exposed its secret.  When I think about death now, I do it while looking at this world.  I think of all the death that accompanies what passes for life here and the termination of a body allowing me to push through those revolving doors in self-empowered mode isn’t an issue anymore.  The way I look at it now is, I’m living a free life in sudden death overtime.   

          Here’s how John Donne put it:

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,
For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.