I appreciate this post. In my wide-ranging readings and research, I came to similar conclusions about the parts of history that have not been openly expressed, especially those related to these recurring catastrophic cycles. During more meditative and inspired states, I also concluded what your conclusion infers about most of the powercrowd not knowing the details of these cycles as well, although what I inferred was that a great many of them are also taken advantage of by older and more studied groups (or hiveminds, if you like), who use their greed and their corruption for their own ends to secure stable forms of life on the planet and its surroundings (think of the Bene Gesserit). This is one of the obvious aspects of the Green Revolution: deliberately tanking key economies and technological innovation by forcing them into dead ends (literally). If you remember (or ever watched) the X-Files series, you might recall that the humans who made deals with the aliens attempted to con the aliens and devised ways to facilitate but also resist genetic assimilation: they were going to use vaccines to alter certain lines within the species to prevent the rewriting process. Polluting the planet and the humans are ways for certain groups to blackmail and resist other groups, and you can see among humans how putting a gun to the head of the hostage is a strategy not only to try and motivate law enforcement to comply, but it is also a way to try and motivate criminals the same way ("I'll just blow up your synthdrug labs and your bank vaults!"). Different groups want different goals, but many of them realize not only the fragility of life on this planet, and in this region, but also the timing of events needed to keep that life filtered, evolving, yet harvestable.
I appreciate your indulgence with these fringe ideas. 😉
I enjoy reading your thoughts, which are fairly well developed by the time you write them, and you are good at writing.
I never watched X-files. I gave up TV for the new millennium. Babylon-5 was the last show I looked at sometimes.
Driving people's better-inclinations into blind-alleys, after making them pay for the map is a good meme. I like it.
I'm worried about groups who don't see or care that life-forms are fragile. I think "life' is pretty antifragile, in general. The big business model is to make life-forms need what you control, or they will die.
Man, that model applies broadly!
I just don't know about aliens, but is "God" an alien? Are whales alien intelligence? Why don't we try to communicate some? There is so much hype. It's a good question if aliens could develop the technology to get here without killing themselves off.
It's clearly possible, but we tend to assume that intelligent life is mostly like us.
I doubt that, since we don't even try to commune with whales. I think they might be deeply intelligent, but we only look for intelligence which is very similar to our own.
I wonder more and more about hive-mind forms, collective-mind, planetary-consciousness and things of that sort. Do intelligent beings who engage that way do better in tsunamis and micronovas? Just wondering...
You might find Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_ and Richard Powers' _The Overstory_ to be worth your time, giving you ideas to further impel your imagination regarding those questions you're asking in the end, and they're both written in compelling and beautiful ways. Once the drama picks up speed, the stories are hard to put down and stay with you.
When I think about it, a sense of self is able to survive the death of some of the parts it comprises, but not a significant portion of them nor the death of distinct nodes or "keystones" or transit points. I've lost pieces of my body, I've exchanged pieces with newer parts: something of the whole remains stable while, at times, the whole stability seemingly shatters. All the little selves separated from the collective, or from our collecting, awaken into their own distinct loneliness, dysfunction, or gasping from pain. They try to go on, sending out signals to whoever listens, but don't make it on their own. So, maybe the fractal pattern holds true for larger hiveminds facing larger catastrophes. (Scaling, right?) As you say and with which I agree: on the whole, life is antifragile (it's everywhere!), but the little ones life comprises are inherently not. Evolutionary exploration requires this balancing of scales. A corporation (or nation-state, or empire . . .) is strong and outlives its pieces, until the planet it's upon explodes from thermonuclear war; a transplanetary corporation with many nodes each harboring the shared ideology of the collective can outlive the destruction of one of those planets —so goes the story told by Elon Musk for Why Mars, right?
Also, here's a paper you might like:
"Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains"
Polemos wrote: "When I think about it, a sense of self is able to survive the death of some of the parts it comprises, but not a significant portion of them nor the death of distinct nodes or "keystones" or transit points. I've lost pieces of my body, I've exchanged pieces with newer parts: something of the whole remains stable while, at times, the whole stability seemingly shatters."
What is "the self"? Buddhism argues that "the self" does not exist in a demonstrable way. You can't put a finger upon "it". This is not a simple question. When I first heard a teaching (Dalai Lama 1991) about the non-existence-of-the-self, I could not comprehend it, though "I" tried my very best. Struggling with the question is a useful practice. I now sense different layers and aspects of "self".
What about a great-consciousness, or different mass-consciousnesses?
There is the consciousness of mass-killing, toyed-with at large sporting events.
There is a worshipful sharing of consciousness in group prayer, singing and chanting, which I experience and appreciate. Jung wrote of a collective-unconscious.
What of a planetary consciousness? What would my role be to help "planetary consciousness be healthy? How would it look if it were healthy?
Is it actually healthy and we can't see that?
I'm just asking, because I can't give a ready answer.
(The rat-"brainnet" article is somehow deeply disturbing. I think we can do this voluntarily as a spiritual practice.)
Thomas Metzinger has two books out that I've found thought-provoking: _Being No One_ is the more academic and larger work, _The Ego Tunnel_ is the more accessible and shorter work. His take is that there is no self, a singular substance of agency and intentionality. Instead, what we have is a virtualization of a world for representing that world and its appearance to the systems (of subsystems) creating that virtualization. He calls it a "tunnel" because it's a constraining virtualization: it cannot represent all of the totality of what is available for experiencing; spatial or temporal orientation is limited; it cannot also represent for itself the subsystems crafting or constructing that virtualization. What it does do is create perspective and actionable opportunities. But there is "no one" looking through the tunnel, there is "no one" using the tunnel. The sensation and feeling of being someone is an illusion created from the way the tunnel operates.
There's a heckuva lot more to it, obviously, but I found Metzinger parallel and complementary with what you find there in Buddhist thought, but also in contemporary nihilistic kinds of thinking, in Lacan's account for subjectivity arising from language use, in various kinds of meditative practice that seek enlightenment via ego death. Thomas Ligotti's _The Conspiracy Against the Human Race_ goes further than these accounts where "there is no ego" and argues (I'm being loose in calling it an "argument" because the book's not really about convincing you ) that consciousness as we experience it is not only unnecessary but (in his capitals) MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Consciousness when thought through cannot remove the horror of its reality, and more than experiencing pain and suffering or causing this to others, all of awareness inevitably concludes in the futility of all its desires, its goals, its aspirations, its contemplations. Beauty is not just fleeting, but a sickening distraction from all the other darkening things. And yet, those who have experienced loss of self, loss of ego, (such as through particular traumatic injuries to distinct areas of the brain or through pharmaceuticals) continue on, sometimes even with "better" capability since there's less wasted time or energy on soothing or placating an ego's inward self-destruction.
My take is a little different, but informed by engaging and admiring what these kinds of accounts are saying. Having experienced derealization/depersonalization, there was recognition in these moments how virtualization of identity requires narratival structure, but does not require continuity of biological activity: the body continues on as the divisions separating 'it' from 'all' blend and blur. When I came back into myself, I understood more not only my childhood fascination with robots but also appreciated much more the autonomy of animals. It is difficult to live separately from the self, the ego, the I, when so much about communication, facilitation, habituation, builds into the human space that grammar: the "first-person" combined with deictic construction of space reinforces illusions/virtualities the body creates for consciousness to occupy. So, it starts to make sense why part of the longer process of Buddhist practice is the separation of phenomenal experience from "thoughts" structured in language. The koan, the chant, the "letting go" of arising thoughts, undermine language primacy in shaping self-awareness. (This is also why you can't really learn Buddhism from a book, and why the Internet reinforces egoism, since we're always using words to "express ourselves")
Out-of-body experiences, on the other hand, demonstrate how even as it's all true that bodies live without ego, that self is constructed and not foundational, nevertheless, there is someone experiencing something. This is where I find Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's "Cosmological Deixis" worth combining with a reading of Krishna's Self-revelation with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: perspectival shifts in awareness don't necessarily entail separation of subjectivity at all. It is logically possible for all awareness to be singular, but it is the "point of view" that creates space for that awareness to become "for itself." Stepping out from one's body begins a longer process of separating that awareness from the ways the body and its virtualization of an ego, flavor, so to speak, tunnels that awareness onto a world.
But, I hope I'm not retreading paths you've already walked in a way that's stepping on your toes.
As for mass consciousness, maybe it's worth it to go back and read Orwell's _1984_ much more slowly and with an eye towards his use of the plural self, the We. I held off on reading _1984_ for a very long time, but a loved one suggested it. Once I did, I found that so much of the conventional thoughts and summaries about the text were lacking: they hardly touched on how much of the Party is a mass consciousness: when O'Brien mindtortures Winston, there is a scene where O'Brien describes crushing and squeezing out everything individual and singular in Winston, calling to mind a vacuum, so that "we will fill you with ourselves." That is inspiration, already there in "the book" where the man says "It is no longer I who live, but Christ in me." Having shed and crucified and put to death all that was old and law-bound, Paul —so he says— is no more someone but is something through which Christ, who is everyone in Christ, lives. Paul also goes on to say that every member is a member of each other, because being-in-Christ means that when Christ is in you, everyone who is in Christ is now inside you. And so, as each person gradually sheds and leaves behind their old self, the extent to which each person's individual self appears inside the others in Christ also gradually sheds and falls away, until everyone is nothing but the absence of anyone not already Christ. Now, Paul was not always a good model for the logic of his own thinking, but it is there and waiting for future totalitarians to take up, as Orwell shows in a fiction how it can happen (or, is happening).
To me, I think this is why those who spend time among animals, plants, all the emotional surge and interconnectedness of a biotic world, find their own thoughts and self-awareness change into something more diffuse, spread across space, quieter yet more intensely aware of extrinsic perspective, a knowing-of-being-watched because it knows where watching occurs. If you were to spend more time among whales, you would also come to sense their community, their dreams, their questions, their struggles, too. If you spend that time spread as wide as a planet, the scale of what counts as an individual's problems grows with it, a new neighborhoods and strangers appear —new loves and new lessons.
Oh yeah, that rat paper is a bit old now. There are more recent papers, I found. Something I've no doubt has already been developed: platoons of soldiers linked in similar networks. Peter Watts explores this in his _Echopraxia_, a sequel to another thought-provoker, his earlier _Blindsight_. Imagine the tactical benefits having actual "armies of one," and it ends up looking like the Tines in Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_, already mentioned earlier.
Thank "You", Polemos. I read that carefully, and with great interest.
The abstract only goes so far, and can be very dangerous when imposing experiential reality upon others. That tunneled-consciousness at the top of a hierarchy is isolated from any feedback, so it can keep causing great harm. We see that.
I don't believe all human minds and bodies are actually similar enough to freely generalize.
When I worked on the Navajo reservation for 2 years, as a doctor, I was told that "we don't think in words". It's different. I can have certain thoughts , feelings, imaginations and experiences without words, but my brain does words a lot.
Sincere intention and effort, and experience of actual life, seem to be the antidote to the abstraction-tunnel of tyrannical internalized, simplified models of reality.
Again, I appreciate your well-considered and presented thoughts.
Speaking about Ben Davidson and the lolar ahift thing (i assime that's what yiu refer to by "caves"), you might like to see this excellent in-depth video that exposes him for exactly what he is (he is ABSOLUTELY NOT an astrophysicist, and NOT an academic in any way shape or form. He is a smooth talking lawyer and a scam artist who is making big sums from the gullibility of his followers.
But i hand it to him, his act is good and i almost fell for it too at first. If you're not a scientist then he sounds very confident like he knows what he's talking about. Turns out, he is talking out of his ass and using scientifocally sounding language to make things up. He also turns into a violent narcissicist when exposed. See the in-depth video https://youtu.be/3fTLZTEE7mU
I am a scientist (4 semesters college physics for instance), and I first learned about Ben Davidson from a friend of mine who has long worked as a programmer at NASA. Ben Davidson is popular there. He is clearly controversial.
I have done my diligence and looked at a lot of NASA videos. I am independently taking in and assessing his theories. He talks fast, but everything he says is coherent and internally consistent. I keep checking. It really does look like the poles are headed for a shift, which weakens the magnetic fields and increases exposure to solar and cosmic radiation.
Regarding Ben Davidson, you might like to see this excellent in-depth video that exposes him for exactly what he is (he is ABSOLUTELY NOT an astrophysicist, and NOT an academic in any way shape or form. He is a smooth talking lawyer and a scam artist that is making big sums from tbe gullibility of his followers) and after watching this shocking video you'll likely be be quite embarassed that you ever fell for this con man (but i hand it to him, his act is good and i almost fell for it too at first. If you're not a scientist then he sounds very confident like he knows what he's talking about. Turns out, he is talking out of his ass and using scientifically sounding language to make things up. He also turns into a violent narcissicist when exposed. See the in-depth video https://youtu.be/3fTLZTEE7mU
As I answered a couple of comments up. Ben Davidsons statements are all valid scientific hypotheses, for which he makes a good scientific argument. He speaks quickly, but it is all coherent and logical, founded in science. I took 4 semesters of college physics, engineering calculus lots of chemistry, did research in college and med school, and independently reviewed hours of NASA videos pertaining to these topics. A long-time NASA friend of mine follows Ben very closely and has for years. NASA is where he learned about him.
Clearly, Ben Davidson is a controversial figure, but I have been looking at his stuff casually for about 14 years, and more seriously recently.
I would like to find a fatal flaw in it. Things would be easier/
I'm of a similar mind. I was an engineering major for 3 years before I had a significant breakdown/breakthrough that led me to pursue psychology instead. During the engineering period, I was immensely interested in mass spectroscopy as it related to astrogeophysics. My reasons for leaving are too long and complicated for a comment; even so, I retained a lot of my contacts from that period and several of them are in agreement that Ben's work is legit. I found him on accident when I was trying to find out why I kept seeing 'weird' things in the sky at night. I tend toward the Occam's razor approach -- the simplest explanations are more likely. Of course the galaxy has cycles that would impact the stars and planets of its galactic body. Etc.
I started in electrical engineering for 3 semesters. I worked my way through college for 6 years, graduating with 225 hours, lots of it science. It took me awhile to find my path, but science was always interesting/
Good soil here, and tolerable weather for a lot of plants. I'm working to push cold tolerant Mexican avocados a little farther north than usual.I've killed something like 30 (mostly grafted) avocado trees so far. Only seedlings seem to make it, and only some seedlings. One is excellent, though. I'm trying to clone it.
Good luck! That would be great~ I've been trying to get a papaya plant to make it through the winter with mulch and a wrap for the trunk. They are delicious and very nutritious! Have you ever grown them?
You are probably right. Although I've heard of both surviving avocados and a papaya in our Victoria area. Success seems to depend on location, as the avocado was on the south side of the house in a corner, protected from wind on two sides. I've thought about digging one of them up - now about 4 feet high, putting in a large pot and moving inside the garage. I did this with another sensitive plant, putting it close to a back door while inside, so it could be moved out in warmer weather and watered. Then moving it out and replanting in the spring. One that we had set nice fruit right before a freeze! The frustrating thing about this area is that warm and cold weather is usually off and on. So right after a killing freeze, the sun comes out for a week or so!
Victoria might be a hair better than Yoakum. A sheltered southern exposure by a wall is ideal. I am trying something like that , a special little spot for a Valencia orange. I'd very much like it to thrive and grow. It is possible, but even the best ones got killed in February 2021. Everywhere I drove, they were no more. Victoria is a really nice place, for a city, but the hurricanes can slap Victoria pretty hard.
Yes we are a bit more south, and you are RIGHT ON about hurricanes! The last one - Harvey 2017- we left and spent 2 weeks in Gonzalez with our cat! There was no power in our neighborhood (in the country near Goliad) as a huge tree had come down and took out all the power lines for the entire neighborhood of 60 homes! When we returned, we had major damage - no fences, a big hole in the shop roof, huge trees down, tree debris everywhere, Internet tower gone, etc. Of course no food left in the fridge. It was the worst damage in the 35 years we've been here! So we cross our fingers every season! Yes, Winter of 2021 was the worst I can remember here ever! It looked like a bomb had dropped on every plant except the live oaks - and they weren't very happy. Amazingly, both my orchid tree and angel trumpets - and others came out from the roots! It took a whole year just to get back much growth, but they did survive. That was also a really unusual time. We lost power repeatedly (Thank you, Texas power grid!) I also managed to fall and break my right wrist on the worst day of cold and ice - February 14th. No power - no open garage door for car, A friend had to come get us and take to the ER! Never a dull moment! ha! Good luck with your Valencia! They are the sweetest! and hard to find!
I wonder why you say you believe in man caused global warming then post recommended videos saying it’s foundation is trash?
The same people that say we (as in we the dirty masse) have to stop driving real cars and live in a little huts and not eat meat and do whatever else they say are the ones flying all over the place in their private jets and buying beachfront mansions and otherwise showing that they don’t believe it to be true for a second. It’s all about power - there’s not a shred of truth to human caused global warming and your videos showed some important points supporting that position that I was unaware of.
The actual scientists and the actual science of greenhouse-gasses and deforestation causing global warming are sound.
The people who are misdirecting society to their own opportunistic business plans, are as you observe.
The reality of anthropogenic global warming is different from the control-narrative/sales-pitch being promulgated by the owners, to maintain their control and ownership.
Recognizing that there are so many other things that change the weather and kill people detracts from the control-narrative, and detracts from the hypocritical Green-Revolution business scams, like electric cars that cause more environmental degradation than a Toyota Corolla would.
Yes "it" is about power. Global warming from human activity is underway. So are a lot of other things that change the weather, about which we are just learning.
The breakdown of our economic arrangements is a very big threat, one that the owners are not prepared to discuss, because to address it threatens their "ownership".
The sudden, catastrophic changes in weather, which have caused mass extinctions, and the human die-offs, which we have learned of lately, are not something the owners are prepared for us to know about yet, if ever.
The power of a control-narrative is to herd all fears and premonitions into one-fear, which can be controlled, so the people can all be controlled.
I live in an area with a great many mining tunnels from the 1850's gold rush era which were re-visited during the escalating anti-vax madness that was building during the worst of the pandemic. I know where to hold out with the family so that is good. I also had co2 issues but never worried too much as I know nature has HUGE flex. Good article John
I'm glad you have that scoped-out. The flash shouldn't weaken tunnels, but the impact of the exploded shell might do all kinds of damage. Still, pick the best, most secure tunnel, and consider blast effects in the mouth of it.
It's weird having these kinds of abstract-knowledge warnings of TEOLAWKI.
I have had a sense of needing to prepare for catastrophe since childhood. It made me attentive to my grandfather, who was in the army in WW-1 and WW-2 and raised a family during the depression in between. Nobody else wanted to listen to his synthesis of the world. Too dark.
Hi Dr. John, what a good article, what is the name of that heater on the wall and how to get it for the cold/hot weather in Florida? I am learning all these prepping ang gardening and working at the same time. Thank you.
It's a Williams unit, the same brand my grandparents had when I was growing up. this is the "direct vent" type, which has both intake and exhaust vents in a single 9 inch diameter hole straight through the wall. This is by far the cheapest and least complicated gas heater to install.
Hot wiring! what a sixties concept. Ben is an interesting person and informative. I've watched most of his videos over the past year or so and having paid a lot of attention to the warming science and sharing the concerns around it, I too have seen things both in global trends as well as local that don't seem to be lining up with the projected path put out by the narrative. Ben's theories seem to explain quite a few unanswered questions in geology and anthropology better than the "experts" seem to do. Concerning your avocado's, I have an old friend who grew an fig tree here in Canada, he used to dig a trench fairly deep starting at the root ball and buried it for the winter. After the leaves had started to shed he would loosen the soil around the root ball and lay it down in the trench, binding the limbs in quite tight to the trunk and cover with earth and mulch. In the spring once he thought it warm enough he would unearth it and stand it back up for the summer. He done this for many years. I don't know if this is worth your effort or even possible with an avocado tree, but for what it is worth, my two cents.
Thanks Red. What I am trying to do is push the cold-tolerance characteristics farther north. I have one avocado tee, a seedling of a Mexican variety, which was unfazed by a late, hard, sudden freeze we got in March, which hurt or killed all of the others. Even some larger and more robust ones that thought it was spring and had fresh growth died back a lot.
This one tree is a cold-prodigy. You have to wait 5-8 years to get fruit from an avocado seedling, though...
Avocados grow wide and fairly superficial roots. Laying it in a trench wouldn't work.
Really good post. The sudden cold front has sparked much change. From 70’s Friday to 20’s Saturday. The lettuces in the small greenhouse doing splendidly. Beets, leeks, garlic, carrots outdoors seem happy.
The sun and EM energy concerns are primal. The coming changes daunting to contemplate.
Hey, John Day.
I appreciate this post. In my wide-ranging readings and research, I came to similar conclusions about the parts of history that have not been openly expressed, especially those related to these recurring catastrophic cycles. During more meditative and inspired states, I also concluded what your conclusion infers about most of the powercrowd not knowing the details of these cycles as well, although what I inferred was that a great many of them are also taken advantage of by older and more studied groups (or hiveminds, if you like), who use their greed and their corruption for their own ends to secure stable forms of life on the planet and its surroundings (think of the Bene Gesserit). This is one of the obvious aspects of the Green Revolution: deliberately tanking key economies and technological innovation by forcing them into dead ends (literally). If you remember (or ever watched) the X-Files series, you might recall that the humans who made deals with the aliens attempted to con the aliens and devised ways to facilitate but also resist genetic assimilation: they were going to use vaccines to alter certain lines within the species to prevent the rewriting process. Polluting the planet and the humans are ways for certain groups to blackmail and resist other groups, and you can see among humans how putting a gun to the head of the hostage is a strategy not only to try and motivate law enforcement to comply, but it is also a way to try and motivate criminals the same way ("I'll just blow up your synthdrug labs and your bank vaults!"). Different groups want different goals, but many of them realize not only the fragility of life on this planet, and in this region, but also the timing of events needed to keep that life filtered, evolving, yet harvestable.
I appreciate your indulgence with these fringe ideas. 😉
"Heyjohnday" was one of my high-school nicknames.
I enjoy reading your thoughts, which are fairly well developed by the time you write them, and you are good at writing.
I never watched X-files. I gave up TV for the new millennium. Babylon-5 was the last show I looked at sometimes.
Driving people's better-inclinations into blind-alleys, after making them pay for the map is a good meme. I like it.
I'm worried about groups who don't see or care that life-forms are fragile. I think "life' is pretty antifragile, in general. The big business model is to make life-forms need what you control, or they will die.
Man, that model applies broadly!
I just don't know about aliens, but is "God" an alien? Are whales alien intelligence? Why don't we try to communicate some? There is so much hype. It's a good question if aliens could develop the technology to get here without killing themselves off.
It's clearly possible, but we tend to assume that intelligent life is mostly like us.
I doubt that, since we don't even try to commune with whales. I think they might be deeply intelligent, but we only look for intelligence which is very similar to our own.
I wonder more and more about hive-mind forms, collective-mind, planetary-consciousness and things of that sort. Do intelligent beings who engage that way do better in tsunamis and micronovas? Just wondering...
You might find Vernor Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_ and Richard Powers' _The Overstory_ to be worth your time, giving you ideas to further impel your imagination regarding those questions you're asking in the end, and they're both written in compelling and beautiful ways. Once the drama picks up speed, the stories are hard to put down and stay with you.
When I think about it, a sense of self is able to survive the death of some of the parts it comprises, but not a significant portion of them nor the death of distinct nodes or "keystones" or transit points. I've lost pieces of my body, I've exchanged pieces with newer parts: something of the whole remains stable while, at times, the whole stability seemingly shatters. All the little selves separated from the collective, or from our collecting, awaken into their own distinct loneliness, dysfunction, or gasping from pain. They try to go on, sending out signals to whoever listens, but don't make it on their own. So, maybe the fractal pattern holds true for larger hiveminds facing larger catastrophes. (Scaling, right?) As you say and with which I agree: on the whole, life is antifragile (it's everywhere!), but the little ones life comprises are inherently not. Evolutionary exploration requires this balancing of scales. A corporation (or nation-state, or empire . . .) is strong and outlives its pieces, until the planet it's upon explodes from thermonuclear war; a transplanetary corporation with many nodes each harboring the shared ideology of the collective can outlive the destruction of one of those planets —so goes the story told by Elon Musk for Why Mars, right?
Also, here's a paper you might like:
"Building an organic computing device with multiple interconnected brains"
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep11869
Polemos wrote: "When I think about it, a sense of self is able to survive the death of some of the parts it comprises, but not a significant portion of them nor the death of distinct nodes or "keystones" or transit points. I've lost pieces of my body, I've exchanged pieces with newer parts: something of the whole remains stable while, at times, the whole stability seemingly shatters."
What is "the self"? Buddhism argues that "the self" does not exist in a demonstrable way. You can't put a finger upon "it". This is not a simple question. When I first heard a teaching (Dalai Lama 1991) about the non-existence-of-the-self, I could not comprehend it, though "I" tried my very best. Struggling with the question is a useful practice. I now sense different layers and aspects of "self".
What about a great-consciousness, or different mass-consciousnesses?
There is the consciousness of mass-killing, toyed-with at large sporting events.
There is a worshipful sharing of consciousness in group prayer, singing and chanting, which I experience and appreciate. Jung wrote of a collective-unconscious.
What of a planetary consciousness? What would my role be to help "planetary consciousness be healthy? How would it look if it were healthy?
Is it actually healthy and we can't see that?
I'm just asking, because I can't give a ready answer.
(The rat-"brainnet" article is somehow deeply disturbing. I think we can do this voluntarily as a spiritual practice.)
Thomas Metzinger has two books out that I've found thought-provoking: _Being No One_ is the more academic and larger work, _The Ego Tunnel_ is the more accessible and shorter work. His take is that there is no self, a singular substance of agency and intentionality. Instead, what we have is a virtualization of a world for representing that world and its appearance to the systems (of subsystems) creating that virtualization. He calls it a "tunnel" because it's a constraining virtualization: it cannot represent all of the totality of what is available for experiencing; spatial or temporal orientation is limited; it cannot also represent for itself the subsystems crafting or constructing that virtualization. What it does do is create perspective and actionable opportunities. But there is "no one" looking through the tunnel, there is "no one" using the tunnel. The sensation and feeling of being someone is an illusion created from the way the tunnel operates.
There's a heckuva lot more to it, obviously, but I found Metzinger parallel and complementary with what you find there in Buddhist thought, but also in contemporary nihilistic kinds of thinking, in Lacan's account for subjectivity arising from language use, in various kinds of meditative practice that seek enlightenment via ego death. Thomas Ligotti's _The Conspiracy Against the Human Race_ goes further than these accounts where "there is no ego" and argues (I'm being loose in calling it an "argument" because the book's not really about convincing you ) that consciousness as we experience it is not only unnecessary but (in his capitals) MALIGNANTLY USELESS. Consciousness when thought through cannot remove the horror of its reality, and more than experiencing pain and suffering or causing this to others, all of awareness inevitably concludes in the futility of all its desires, its goals, its aspirations, its contemplations. Beauty is not just fleeting, but a sickening distraction from all the other darkening things. And yet, those who have experienced loss of self, loss of ego, (such as through particular traumatic injuries to distinct areas of the brain or through pharmaceuticals) continue on, sometimes even with "better" capability since there's less wasted time or energy on soothing or placating an ego's inward self-destruction.
My take is a little different, but informed by engaging and admiring what these kinds of accounts are saying. Having experienced derealization/depersonalization, there was recognition in these moments how virtualization of identity requires narratival structure, but does not require continuity of biological activity: the body continues on as the divisions separating 'it' from 'all' blend and blur. When I came back into myself, I understood more not only my childhood fascination with robots but also appreciated much more the autonomy of animals. It is difficult to live separately from the self, the ego, the I, when so much about communication, facilitation, habituation, builds into the human space that grammar: the "first-person" combined with deictic construction of space reinforces illusions/virtualities the body creates for consciousness to occupy. So, it starts to make sense why part of the longer process of Buddhist practice is the separation of phenomenal experience from "thoughts" structured in language. The koan, the chant, the "letting go" of arising thoughts, undermine language primacy in shaping self-awareness. (This is also why you can't really learn Buddhism from a book, and why the Internet reinforces egoism, since we're always using words to "express ourselves")
Out-of-body experiences, on the other hand, demonstrate how even as it's all true that bodies live without ego, that self is constructed and not foundational, nevertheless, there is someone experiencing something. This is where I find Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's "Cosmological Deixis" worth combining with a reading of Krishna's Self-revelation with Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita: perspectival shifts in awareness don't necessarily entail separation of subjectivity at all. It is logically possible for all awareness to be singular, but it is the "point of view" that creates space for that awareness to become "for itself." Stepping out from one's body begins a longer process of separating that awareness from the ways the body and its virtualization of an ego, flavor, so to speak, tunnels that awareness onto a world.
But, I hope I'm not retreading paths you've already walked in a way that's stepping on your toes.
As for mass consciousness, maybe it's worth it to go back and read Orwell's _1984_ much more slowly and with an eye towards his use of the plural self, the We. I held off on reading _1984_ for a very long time, but a loved one suggested it. Once I did, I found that so much of the conventional thoughts and summaries about the text were lacking: they hardly touched on how much of the Party is a mass consciousness: when O'Brien mindtortures Winston, there is a scene where O'Brien describes crushing and squeezing out everything individual and singular in Winston, calling to mind a vacuum, so that "we will fill you with ourselves." That is inspiration, already there in "the book" where the man says "It is no longer I who live, but Christ in me." Having shed and crucified and put to death all that was old and law-bound, Paul —so he says— is no more someone but is something through which Christ, who is everyone in Christ, lives. Paul also goes on to say that every member is a member of each other, because being-in-Christ means that when Christ is in you, everyone who is in Christ is now inside you. And so, as each person gradually sheds and leaves behind their old self, the extent to which each person's individual self appears inside the others in Christ also gradually sheds and falls away, until everyone is nothing but the absence of anyone not already Christ. Now, Paul was not always a good model for the logic of his own thinking, but it is there and waiting for future totalitarians to take up, as Orwell shows in a fiction how it can happen (or, is happening).
To me, I think this is why those who spend time among animals, plants, all the emotional surge and interconnectedness of a biotic world, find their own thoughts and self-awareness change into something more diffuse, spread across space, quieter yet more intensely aware of extrinsic perspective, a knowing-of-being-watched because it knows where watching occurs. If you were to spend more time among whales, you would also come to sense their community, their dreams, their questions, their struggles, too. If you spend that time spread as wide as a planet, the scale of what counts as an individual's problems grows with it, a new neighborhoods and strangers appear —new loves and new lessons.
Oh yeah, that rat paper is a bit old now. There are more recent papers, I found. Something I've no doubt has already been developed: platoons of soldiers linked in similar networks. Peter Watts explores this in his _Echopraxia_, a sequel to another thought-provoker, his earlier _Blindsight_. Imagine the tactical benefits having actual "armies of one," and it ends up looking like the Tines in Vinge's _A Fire Upon the Deep_, already mentioned earlier.
Thank "You", Polemos. I read that carefully, and with great interest.
The abstract only goes so far, and can be very dangerous when imposing experiential reality upon others. That tunneled-consciousness at the top of a hierarchy is isolated from any feedback, so it can keep causing great harm. We see that.
I don't believe all human minds and bodies are actually similar enough to freely generalize.
When I worked on the Navajo reservation for 2 years, as a doctor, I was told that "we don't think in words". It's different. I can have certain thoughts , feelings, imaginations and experiences without words, but my brain does words a lot.
Sincere intention and effort, and experience of actual life, seem to be the antidote to the abstraction-tunnel of tyrannical internalized, simplified models of reality.
Again, I appreciate your well-considered and presented thoughts.
Thanks for the heads up. Already located some caves.
Speaking about Ben Davidson and the lolar ahift thing (i assime that's what yiu refer to by "caves"), you might like to see this excellent in-depth video that exposes him for exactly what he is (he is ABSOLUTELY NOT an astrophysicist, and NOT an academic in any way shape or form. He is a smooth talking lawyer and a scam artist who is making big sums from the gullibility of his followers.
But i hand it to him, his act is good and i almost fell for it too at first. If you're not a scientist then he sounds very confident like he knows what he's talking about. Turns out, he is talking out of his ass and using scientifocally sounding language to make things up. He also turns into a violent narcissicist when exposed. See the in-depth video https://youtu.be/3fTLZTEE7mU
Thanks Dan,
I am a scientist (4 semesters college physics for instance), and I first learned about Ben Davidson from a friend of mine who has long worked as a programmer at NASA. Ben Davidson is popular there. He is clearly controversial.
I have done my diligence and looked at a lot of NASA videos. I am independently taking in and assessing his theories. He talks fast, but everything he says is coherent and internally consistent. I keep checking. It really does look like the poles are headed for a shift, which weakens the magnetic fields and increases exposure to solar and cosmic radiation.
This much seems assured.
I love Ben's work. Thank you for highlighting it for your readers.
Thanks. A lot of people reflexively reject it.
Regarding Ben Davidson, you might like to see this excellent in-depth video that exposes him for exactly what he is (he is ABSOLUTELY NOT an astrophysicist, and NOT an academic in any way shape or form. He is a smooth talking lawyer and a scam artist that is making big sums from tbe gullibility of his followers) and after watching this shocking video you'll likely be be quite embarassed that you ever fell for this con man (but i hand it to him, his act is good and i almost fell for it too at first. If you're not a scientist then he sounds very confident like he knows what he's talking about. Turns out, he is talking out of his ass and using scientifically sounding language to make things up. He also turns into a violent narcissicist when exposed. See the in-depth video https://youtu.be/3fTLZTEE7mU
Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
As I answered a couple of comments up. Ben Davidsons statements are all valid scientific hypotheses, for which he makes a good scientific argument. He speaks quickly, but it is all coherent and logical, founded in science. I took 4 semesters of college physics, engineering calculus lots of chemistry, did research in college and med school, and independently reviewed hours of NASA videos pertaining to these topics. A long-time NASA friend of mine follows Ben very closely and has for years. NASA is where he learned about him.
Clearly, Ben Davidson is a controversial figure, but I have been looking at his stuff casually for about 14 years, and more seriously recently.
I would like to find a fatal flaw in it. Things would be easier/
I'm of a similar mind. I was an engineering major for 3 years before I had a significant breakdown/breakthrough that led me to pursue psychology instead. During the engineering period, I was immensely interested in mass spectroscopy as it related to astrogeophysics. My reasons for leaving are too long and complicated for a comment; even so, I retained a lot of my contacts from that period and several of them are in agreement that Ben's work is legit. I found him on accident when I was trying to find out why I kept seeing 'weird' things in the sky at night. I tend toward the Occam's razor approach -- the simplest explanations are more likely. Of course the galaxy has cycles that would impact the stars and planets of its galactic body. Etc.
I started in electrical engineering for 3 semesters. I worked my way through college for 6 years, graduating with 225 hours, lots of it science. It took me awhile to find my path, but science was always interesting/
I'm still trying to find mine. I'm an everythinger-ish artist/etc. teacher person lady. It works!
You are in Yoakum! I live not far south from you! Sounds like you've done your good research on how to live well in Nature! Best of luck!
Good soil here, and tolerable weather for a lot of plants. I'm working to push cold tolerant Mexican avocados a little farther north than usual.I've killed something like 30 (mostly grafted) avocado trees so far. Only seedlings seem to make it, and only some seedlings. One is excellent, though. I'm trying to clone it.
You may find this interesting from one of my favorite sites:
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cultivating-subtropical-plants-in-freezing-temperatures.html
The part about moving seeds north each generation is just cool to me.
Thanks. I actually read that in Low Tech Magazine something like a decade or more ago.
Good luck! That would be great~ I've been trying to get a papaya plant to make it through the winter with mulch and a wrap for the trunk. They are delicious and very nutritious! Have you ever grown them?
i have not grown papaya, but I would not think they would survive freezing. They are all over the place in Hawaii, but not Yoakum.
I tried to grow a Pickering mango, the most cold tolerant, but it dies in it's first winter.
You are probably right. Although I've heard of both surviving avocados and a papaya in our Victoria area. Success seems to depend on location, as the avocado was on the south side of the house in a corner, protected from wind on two sides. I've thought about digging one of them up - now about 4 feet high, putting in a large pot and moving inside the garage. I did this with another sensitive plant, putting it close to a back door while inside, so it could be moved out in warmer weather and watered. Then moving it out and replanting in the spring. One that we had set nice fruit right before a freeze! The frustrating thing about this area is that warm and cold weather is usually off and on. So right after a killing freeze, the sun comes out for a week or so!
Victoria might be a hair better than Yoakum. A sheltered southern exposure by a wall is ideal. I am trying something like that , a special little spot for a Valencia orange. I'd very much like it to thrive and grow. It is possible, but even the best ones got killed in February 2021. Everywhere I drove, they were no more. Victoria is a really nice place, for a city, but the hurricanes can slap Victoria pretty hard.
Yes we are a bit more south, and you are RIGHT ON about hurricanes! The last one - Harvey 2017- we left and spent 2 weeks in Gonzalez with our cat! There was no power in our neighborhood (in the country near Goliad) as a huge tree had come down and took out all the power lines for the entire neighborhood of 60 homes! When we returned, we had major damage - no fences, a big hole in the shop roof, huge trees down, tree debris everywhere, Internet tower gone, etc. Of course no food left in the fridge. It was the worst damage in the 35 years we've been here! So we cross our fingers every season! Yes, Winter of 2021 was the worst I can remember here ever! It looked like a bomb had dropped on every plant except the live oaks - and they weren't very happy. Amazingly, both my orchid tree and angel trumpets - and others came out from the roots! It took a whole year just to get back much growth, but they did survive. That was also a really unusual time. We lost power repeatedly (Thank you, Texas power grid!) I also managed to fall and break my right wrist on the worst day of cold and ice - February 14th. No power - no open garage door for car, A friend had to come get us and take to the ER! Never a dull moment! ha! Good luck with your Valencia! They are the sweetest! and hard to find!
John,
I wonder why you say you believe in man caused global warming then post recommended videos saying it’s foundation is trash?
The same people that say we (as in we the dirty masse) have to stop driving real cars and live in a little huts and not eat meat and do whatever else they say are the ones flying all over the place in their private jets and buying beachfront mansions and otherwise showing that they don’t believe it to be true for a second. It’s all about power - there’s not a shred of truth to human caused global warming and your videos showed some important points supporting that position that I was unaware of.
Thanks.
The actual scientists and the actual science of greenhouse-gasses and deforestation causing global warming are sound.
The people who are misdirecting society to their own opportunistic business plans, are as you observe.
The reality of anthropogenic global warming is different from the control-narrative/sales-pitch being promulgated by the owners, to maintain their control and ownership.
Recognizing that there are so many other things that change the weather and kill people detracts from the control-narrative, and detracts from the hypocritical Green-Revolution business scams, like electric cars that cause more environmental degradation than a Toyota Corolla would.
Yes "it" is about power. Global warming from human activity is underway. So are a lot of other things that change the weather, about which we are just learning.
The breakdown of our economic arrangements is a very big threat, one that the owners are not prepared to discuss, because to address it threatens their "ownership".
The sudden, catastrophic changes in weather, which have caused mass extinctions, and the human die-offs, which we have learned of lately, are not something the owners are prepared for us to know about yet, if ever.
The power of a control-narrative is to herd all fears and premonitions into one-fear, which can be controlled, so the people can all be controlled.
I live in an area with a great many mining tunnels from the 1850's gold rush era which were re-visited during the escalating anti-vax madness that was building during the worst of the pandemic. I know where to hold out with the family so that is good. I also had co2 issues but never worried too much as I know nature has HUGE flex. Good article John
Thanks Amigo,
I'm glad you have that scoped-out. The flash shouldn't weaken tunnels, but the impact of the exploded shell might do all kinds of damage. Still, pick the best, most secure tunnel, and consider blast effects in the mouth of it.
It's weird having these kinds of abstract-knowledge warnings of TEOLAWKI.
I have had a sense of needing to prepare for catastrophe since childhood. It made me attentive to my grandfather, who was in the army in WW-1 and WW-2 and raised a family during the depression in between. Nobody else wanted to listen to his synthesis of the world. Too dark.
"Nothing's as precious as a hole in the ground." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofrqm6-LCqs
Midnight Oil! loved that you sent that - there is an aussie in you yet Dr Day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pKPNnk-JhE my favourite.
Yeah I think to look at the dark is critical in the life of the seeker but then to not take the world too seriously is to acknowledge the infinite.
Blue Sky Mine and Beds Are Burning can run through my mind over and over and over.
Hi Dr. John, what a good article, what is the name of that heater on the wall and how to get it for the cold/hot weather in Florida? I am learning all these prepping ang gardening and working at the same time. Thank you.
It's a Williams unit, the same brand my grandparents had when I was growing up. this is the "direct vent" type, which has both intake and exhaust vents in a single 9 inch diameter hole straight through the wall. This is by far the cheapest and least complicated gas heater to install.
I mounted mine on an east wall, where it won't get hard north wind blowing right into its vents in the winter. https://www.williamscomfortprod.com/products/furnaces/direct-vent-detail-page/
Home Depot has them.
Thank you.
Interesting read. One we are all dead we won't know it.
Imagine the sun darkening, though...
:-o
Hot wiring! what a sixties concept. Ben is an interesting person and informative. I've watched most of his videos over the past year or so and having paid a lot of attention to the warming science and sharing the concerns around it, I too have seen things both in global trends as well as local that don't seem to be lining up with the projected path put out by the narrative. Ben's theories seem to explain quite a few unanswered questions in geology and anthropology better than the "experts" seem to do. Concerning your avocado's, I have an old friend who grew an fig tree here in Canada, he used to dig a trench fairly deep starting at the root ball and buried it for the winter. After the leaves had started to shed he would loosen the soil around the root ball and lay it down in the trench, binding the limbs in quite tight to the trunk and cover with earth and mulch. In the spring once he thought it warm enough he would unearth it and stand it back up for the summer. He done this for many years. I don't know if this is worth your effort or even possible with an avocado tree, but for what it is worth, my two cents.
Thanks Red. What I am trying to do is push the cold-tolerance characteristics farther north. I have one avocado tee, a seedling of a Mexican variety, which was unfazed by a late, hard, sudden freeze we got in March, which hurt or killed all of the others. Even some larger and more robust ones that thought it was spring and had fresh growth died back a lot.
This one tree is a cold-prodigy. You have to wait 5-8 years to get fruit from an avocado seedling, though...
Avocados grow wide and fairly superficial roots. Laying it in a trench wouldn't work.
Really good post. The sudden cold front has sparked much change. From 70’s Friday to 20’s Saturday. The lettuces in the small greenhouse doing splendidly. Beets, leeks, garlic, carrots outdoors seem happy.
The sun and EM energy concerns are primal. The coming changes daunting to contemplate.
I'm glad you have your winter garden in and it is doing well!
Time-worthy to get to the second to the last paragraph. Thank you.
thank you.