by Carol Warner Christen
(Swans - June 18, 2007) The child of nature laughed and played, worked and stayed. The child of man worked and marched, fought and strayed. The child of nature grew and thrived. The child of man shriveled inside and died. The child of nature played by nature's rules: laughed; cried; learned; respected life; overcame original nature. The child of man played by the father's rules: whined; wanted; cried; learned to lie; tried and tried; could never be true to nature; fell prey to becoming like the father, even if a mother.
Human is as human does, some will say. Human isn't as human was, at least not today. To be human is to be at the mercy of restrictions as we layer and contain ourselves ever more tightly to conceptions, deceptions, misconceptions, perceptions, especially during receptions. We left the cave, the hut, the teepee to move to small boxes within larger boxes. We built bigger boxes, then mansion-sized boxes covering the land, the field, and the woods. We need ever so many more boxes as we cover the earth with buildings for our comfort and ease, warmth or coolness, fashionable if possible, a hovel if not.
Long ago, Sir Walter Scott said, "What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." Let's add to his quote achieve, believe, conceive, perceive, and receive! To achieve, first we believe. We then perceive what we conceive. We receive even if we deceive. To believe, we perceive so we can conceive what we wish to receive. To conceive, we perceive or deceive about that which we believe we will achieve. To deceive, we believe what we want because we must achieve and receive whatever we perceive. To perceive, we see what we believe when we conceive what we want to receive. To receive, we achieve what we conceive from what we believe. We are happy even if we cheat.
We build moveable containers for ourselves and our progeny because everything is now so far away that we must travel back and forth and back again or to and fro, often many times a day to get what we must have to eat to buy to carry back in tinier boxes, or bags, littering the landscapes and the landfills, all full of little boxes, all the same. We do not stop as opening each little box requires more and more effort, more parts to seal. Naples no longer has places to dump trash; it sits in the streets, reeking. Here in Oregon a landfill sits next to a winery. The landfill grows higher and higher (40 feet now); and, the winery owner feels angrier and angrier as his customers are repelled. No one wants to shop in Naples anymore either. The pictures we used to get of the poor scavenging dumps may become commonplace soon in more ways than one.
Some of us are more equal than others. We know this because we can discriminate and we do. Our family, our group, our church, our school, our neighborhood, our pedigree, our income are always better than others'. Ever since 1896, equality has changed in favor of group Corporatenesses, the high and mighty, richly endowed with personhood beyond any of our mere human chances to equal. Unless we each incorporate, we are cogs in, and of, corporations that exploit whatever is possible, degrading us and our entire planet. No, you say? Maybe the dirt in the air from China, from India, from wars makes no difference to you. All of it made by corporations, global conceptions, birthed in board rooms, conceived well or badly, by good men and bad. It doesn't matter because to matter takes money, makes money, is money.
This century later is a giant human hangover: global warming; fish filled with toxins from waters we no longer dare to swim; fish unfit to eat but our mothers are full of mercury; mountaintops scrapped off for resources; mountaintops poured onto the valleys now full of poisonous runoff from the loads of lodes we skimmed. Someone rich is happy and unaware that elites will not escape the toll either. Depletion here and there and everywhere will not spring back. Depletion means spent for we are raping our only Earth.
Of course, our atoms do not mind that other atoms share their space, destroying our soft tissues. The atoms are not destroyed; they recycle themselves. Did they long, in those mountain tops and in those veins of ore to be free and flow down hillsides to swim away in the waters to us, to the fish, to move and "live" for awhile? After all, we only "live once," we say. The atoms move through many lives and possibilities. Do we?
Our hallowed books say the words: eternal life. Life is only here in dimensional matter. Does that mean we live, and live again, conceived over and over, to enjoy the latest human endeavors? Our souls may be eternal; we might be, too. We just have to grow a body each time, or not.
If you think about it, we barely have time enough in one life to experience it all. How could we understand women and men, if it's only once and we never felt being the other? Then, there are the places to go, to see, to feel; there are the full lives, plus the empty and the half-full lives along with every illness. We do not have the time to be the titan and poor in one life although it has happened to a few. Life's afterlife is not life or living; it is the essence only of our souls.
Our gift of free will has no place in heaven or hell for neither place constitutes real matter. We may return often to earth because we really have nothing to do in the other six dimensions, do we? Many will insist that simply being in God's presence is sufficient; maybe so, if one no longer wishes to matter because life itself is too boring. Or, to the contrary, how long can a physically-based being simply worship that which is so far beyond us? Was worship ever God's true purpose for creating endless wonders, such as us?
Nothing was ever written that we morph into angelic forms. The angelic forms are ageless creations before we were, so we have heard. Neither do we become God by virtue of worship in heaven or on earth. An hour or two on our knees in a church once per week is the requirement of religions, not God. After all, God threw us out of the Garden of Eden. God could have thrown us on our knees. Why did God give us free will? Free will is not worship; it is respect, in spite of differences. In other words, God is ethical. Are we ethical when we kill or maim those who do not obey our equally human wills?
Back to this planet, then, to ask ourselves some hard and funny questions. Why do some of us perceive ourselves as a god to be worshiped, placated, and obeyed? Since all of humanity is human, there is no reason on earth to worship one of us or another. Who stands on your shoulders demanding obeisance: man or God? It's always either or neither or both. Louis Black has a DVD: (Red, White And Screwed, 2006) and he reminds us that the Old Testament belongs to the Jewish people as do the original Ten Commandments. Christians only have two Commandments; although so many laws, sins, addendums, etcetera have been added in 2000 years that it is easier, I guess, to just pretend Jewish Commandments cover all the Christian laws, promulgations, rules, and love. It would be fun to have a contest to see how many Christians know what those two Commandments are. I'll never tell. When I ask, I get a vacant look from them.
The amazing thing is the number of people who want to be worshiped. Life must be easier with retinues and rules, bowing and scrapping, forever the center of attention which spells: EGO. For the life of me, I don't get it. The Ego is merely ten percent of our left brain capacity. It is to do worldly work, such as procuring food, love, homes, children, work, i.e., the busyness of daily life is dominated by beta waves. Beta waves are from fourteen to thirty cycles per second. The alpha waves in the right brain are slower from seven to fourteen cps and are the inner consciousness of the soul and of mind. The dreaming state is called theta waves from four to seven cps. The delta waves are from zero to four cps. Delta is the state where cell repair and healing occur and no one knows much about delta for it is the unconscious area of mind. Jose Silva made a chart of these in 1973 called "The Scale of Brain Evolution."
Ego uses force to get its way when flattery, charm, bribery, and threats do not work. Ego creates death when it believes it is more than human. Ego becomes "God" to weaker human beings: those who are frightened or flattered or who have a wish to live on any terms. On earth, there is no higher power than an inflated, armed Ego, is there?
Humanity continues to attempt to put order and law and rules upon the wantonness of individual egos. The biggest egos hire others to help them override those rules of fairness. Those egos hire propagandists: persons who use words as tools to sway others to void, avoid, the fairness implied. And, people let them. And, people believe them. Why? The United States of America, a bastion of freedom, is falling under ego's spell because Ego is using information theory to bombard the living with massive amounts of propaganda, i.e., bullshit, in the form of computers, television, movies, cell phones, and etcetera. All are designed to distract and to amuse and to avoid noticing war, torture, death, taxes, the privatization of government functions, privation, lack of money, rising costs, poisons in the water, air, land, plants, people, foods.
When Jared Diamond described the Papuan New Guineans in his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), one outstanding trait in New Guinean society stood out: they talked about each and every idea until the entire group knew where it stood on every subject. All of them raised their own food and provided enough tree cover to prevent the English from finding them until an airplane flew over and noticed all the huts and gardens. The best part was about their "Big Men." Big men shared the same exact life as all the others; however, they were allowed to address the problems because they could state them so well the rest could then continue the discussion until all had decided whatever was needed. The big men did not decide. Ego was thus controlled. It might take time to do this. Now we have so little time to think, to be, to talk because the clock is always running and someone else always knows what's best.
Humanity has rarely put woman first since patriarchy took over during the agricultural age so long, long ago. Each human has two brain halves which are joined by two huge bundles of nerves called corpus callosum. In men, the size of the two is smaller than the size of the corpus callosum of a woman. Unless a man is a writer, an artist, or a musician, he foregoes the use of his right brain as too emotional and moves, more or less permanently, into the ego side: the left brain. Hence, the colossal egos of so many men.
Woman, on the other hand, has a very large corpus callosum. Since woman nurtures both male and female for at least six years, she must communicate with both brains in both types of children; hence, woman feels more, knows more. Speech, however, is in the left brain except for the left-handed, a special case of the transfer of speech functions to the right brain in return for some other functions. Be that as it may, left-handedness is a small proportion of the population as a whole. Woman communicates one on one with very small humans, often for years. Her ego is subordinate to her rather than dominant as in males. Long ago, males lived together to learn from each other after the age of six whatever was required for manhood, which a woman does not teach. Women soften the harshness of life and beautify it, love it as it flowers.
This tendency of her nerve bundles keeps women from true political partnership in the modern world peopled inordinately with men whose egos enjoy the limelight. Long ago, women had the final say after the men had any formal discussions. Women watched and listened and decided for the whole. Now, women barely watch the public political arena, much less affect its pronouncements which are often maniacally egotistical today, promoting war, torture, and death for humans, even babies or children, whose resources are coveted which diminishes their right to human life. If they should foolishly protest the warriors, they will be killed. The manufacture of more and more outrageously horrible weapons is beyond belief. The fact that we will test them and use them on unsuspecting persons is criminal at minimum. At best, we can hope these fools spend a sojourn in hell which is of dubious utility to life itself, assuming it even exists except as a place to discard our worst.
Women have been degraded and paraded endlessly in movies, on television, and on the internet as sexual objects, not as human beings. Women are raped, as are small girls, in outrageous numbers. Is it because there are three extra females in every one hundred American humans? Pedophilia exists in religious institutions, for heaven's sake! Men and boys are raped but never can turn the tide on the rapists who have been doing this since time immemorial to put other males in the place of women, i.e. devalued below the macho rapist. Funny that no one discusses this. Did you know rich men often bugger their sons to keep them in line and have done so for centuries? Is it any wonder what is commonplace is ignored? Boys or women, girls or subordinates, it is all the same to the patriarchy, isn't it? It is pure power.
Power is, according to Carlos Castenada, who wrote The Teachings Of Don Juan, one of the four enemies of man along with fear, knowledge, and old age. It seems as if we have them all now. The Executive Branch in cahoots with the free, but newly bribed, press promotes fear in every possible venue and in every possible way to promote their power, not ours as we whimper, whine, and cry about other humans writ so large they will come here and kill us without boats, planes, or means. An amazing idea or maybe they already walk on water and, if we look out to sea, there they'll be ready to kill all of us. They are unstoppable according to our specious leader group of the military-industrial-congressional-church complex. The power to destroy the world is well-known and no one cares if we destroy it. We have 30,000 nuclear bombs and, long ago, I calculated all we need is 90 well-placed bombs and the planet is a charred, dead chunk as appealing as Mars or the Moon to live upon. Of course, that assumes that you and yours still live, breathe, drive, and have work, food, and shelter. Do you really believe that you would live and the rest of us would die either quickly or miserably slowly in the aftermath? How often do you do a reality check?
You might say I'm just showing off all my knowledge and you'd be correct. Knowledge is also an enemy of man. We have so much information stored, we don't have enough people to even read it, much less know where and what it all is. Information keeps piling up and storage devices handle more and more of it. We cut down trees to record it; we manufacture disks; we spy on each other just in case someone has an extra piece of information we don't have. The best thing to do is simply stop educating our young and no one will be the wiser. We are now doing that. Our young are in 24th place worldwide on the knowledge scale. Our talent must have peaked somewhere around Richard Nixon's tenure in the Executive Branch and it's been downhill ever since the brutes (one of the six Buddhist worlds here: gods, hell, purgatory, human, brute, hungry ghosts) took over the White House with their own blessing by stealing our votes.
Old age is the last enemy of man and, with the Baby Boomer population looming on the old age horizon, the country may just keel over. Debt is now over $515,000 per household (USA Today, Dennis Cauchon, May 30, 2007) for wars and whatnot, rather than life. Will we just "go quietly into that good night" as Dylan Thomas wrote or will we start with a new and better idea of human life than money, rape, pillaging, and death?
Keep your eyes on the six phases of a project and life just might become a little clearer, a little better, and, in the long run, survive us. The phases are, in order: 1. Enthusiasm; 2. Disillusionment; 3. Panic; 4. Search for the Guilty; 5. Punishment of the Innocent; and, 6. Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants. We seem to be in one or another of all the phases at once right now.
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