First there were storms, and with them came cyclones. Then the sky cleared, and there were earthquakes. Then the skies turned to grey and we could see in the distance a wall of water, a wave higher than mountains. It was miles offshore and seemed frozen in time, but it was moving faster than anyone could imagine. It was inevitability incarnate. It would drown the world of men.
Some people fought, some people fucked. Some took their lives, some fled the coast though they knew it was futile. The wave was the end, and we could literally see the end approaching. We were forced to come to terms with our mortality and the destruction of everything we knew. Most broke down, went mad. Their world was material, their self was distinct. Loss of both was incomprehensible. Only the sages were at peace.
What will survive the end of the world? What will remain true when men are gone? These are the things we should put stock in. A philosophy that holds good only for the living will do no good when we are dead.
Paul Winter – And the Earth Spins || 1990/Earth: Voices of a Planet
A thousand years is but an instant. There’s nothing new, nothing different. The same pattern over and over. The same clouds, the same music, the same insight I felt an hour or an eternity ago. There’s nothing here for me now, nothing at all. Now I remember. This happened to me before. This is why I left. You have begun to find your answers. Although it will seem difficult, the rewards will be great. Exercise your human mind as fully as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the senses, feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion and tote the emotional memory in your travel bag. I remember where I came from and how I became a human, why I hung around, and now my final departure is scheduled. This way out. Escaping velocity. Not just eternity, but infinity.
-Ryan Power
Imagine your nature as a vessel, your nurture as its contents. We’d all like to be perfect vessels – healthy bodies, beautiful faces. But we can’t choose or change our vessel, only its contents. When we are young our vessels fill quickly; by adulthood they are nearly full. And there is only so much a vessel can hold. We try to add more to our vessels only to find there is no more room.
A vessel full of oil can hold no water; a chest full of iron can hold no gold. A life full of distraction can hold no meaning; a life full of pain can hold no joy. Before you can add the good, you must remove the bad. In the universe, development occurs in stages; matter to life, life to mind, mind to spirit. Personal development should follow a similar structure. Each stage reinforces the last, and the next. Each stage breathes new life into the world.
The mind depends on the body; the spiritual is rooted in the physical. So start there. If you have no food or shelter, you will have no peace. If you are sick or in pain, overweight or malnourished, the mind will suffer in turn. Take charge of your surroundings and your health; care for your body as it cares for you.
Look to the emotional. If you desire companionship, seek it out; if you require solitude, do not let others impose upon it. Be true to your nature. Abandon fear to seek what you desire. In the dark bottom of your vessel swim the inpourings of childhood. Extend a hand to the nightmares and terrors that reside there. Drench them in love; they will self-immolate.
Pure emotion leads to pure thought. Develop the focus and clarity of your mind; stimulate it with ideas, deepen them with understanding. Stop loops and cycles of meaningless thought; still the babble of your inner voice. Let thoughts take their course rather than running after them. The power of focus will illuminate the world; the power of understanding will reveal its wonder.
Then, clear your mind. Let your thoughts dissipate, let your emotions subside, let your body drift unawares. Your vessel is full of emptiness. You’re back at the beginning.
And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
-I Timothy 6: 8-10
As I mentioned in a previous post, we’re beginning to see a new economic paradigm emerging in the free-data environment of the internet. As expected, it’s meeting with resistance in many forms. Intellectual property is a common subject brought up in discussions of copyright in the digital age; the joke is that the only true argument against information freedom applies only within the monetary economy that information freedom is trying to transcend! Intellectual property is first and foremost a concept created to protect private wealth (primarily of corporations) based on information. Ideas have monetary value, and must therefore be protected within a capitalist economy. In a post-scarcity/trans-monetary economy there is neither monetary value nor private wealth, and concepts of intellectual property are not only impossible to uphold, but a hindrance to progress.
I wake up around 7, sometimes 6 or 8. Sun’s streaming through the window. I rarely wake up hungry; I’m thinking about what I’m going to do with my day, not my food. My eating habits are completely irregular, so nothing’s ever out of the ordinary. Some days I’ll eat 2 meals, some days 3, some days 1. My first meal might be at 6 am, might come at 1 in the afternoon. Sometimes I eat big meals, sometimes I graze. All depends on my day.
I cook every day, but I love to cook; fasting doesn’t save me time in that sense, just reallocates it. In the morning I’m usually involved in work, chores, or reading, so I don’t notice anything. Around 11 I get a few grumbles, and the beginning of a sense of hunger. Right now all I’m doing is skipping breakfast, which people do every day, usually for worse reasons. Still, it’s the beginning of the only hard part of a fast.
In the beginning, in the dream-time, there was a beginning before the beginning, before even sky-father was to be, but this is not our beginning. Sky-father was born in the dream-time, and was alone for more spans of the lives of men than have ever been lived. And in the dream-time sky-father became so great that earth-mother was pulled to him, and this is our beginning.
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In the beginning, sky-father rained his seed upon the earth until she ran red, and when she could take no more she cried out, and her breath enveloped her. And it was not long before her womb began to swell, and she felt a stirring, delicate and small within her. Within her it grew, and she held it inside her waters until one day she shuddered, and behold; it-child came forth from her waters and breathed of the air, and blinked its eyes in the light of sky-father.
And it came to pass that it-child grew and became strong, and walked upon earth-mother and was fed and clothed by her. In time it-child became many, and learned to speak, and with speech it-child realized its thoughts, and gave things names, and called itself man. And man looked about, and saw his mother, close and embracing, and his father, distant and powerful. And man reached out to sky-father but could not touch him, and there was much he did not understand.
So it came to pass that in some places man turned his back on earthly things and sought to commune with sky-father, and in these places he built great temples and towers, that they might be closer to his radiance. And in some places man turned his gaze from the skies to commune with earth-mother, and in these places he beat drums and stamped feat and reveled in her ecstasies. And in both places there was joy, but there was always a great terror, and a great sadness, for sometimes earth-mother would shake and there would be a great many deaths, and there were times when sky-father seemed to have forsaken man, for he did not answer his calls.
Much time passed. To earth-mother it was a mere day, to sky-father it was an eyeblink, but it was many, many lives of men. For man had grown stronger still, strong enough that some days earth-mother felt pain from man as strong as he had once felt from her. Time had passed, and though man was still young, there was much that man had forgotten, from the early days, the dream-time of man. Though he still clung to earth-mother, with every passing day he took more from her, and grew farther from her, for the time was nearing, the coming-of-age, when man would leave behind his mother-home to enter into the halls of his father, irradiant beyond measure, and beyond: for until that age, man had never known that one day he would go where even sky-father could not; that one day, he would be truly grown.
Paul Winter – Under the Sun || 1990/Earth: Voices of a Planet
