Natural growth

I spend some time today pruning back pea vines, burying potato plants with homemade compost, and giving plants I want to have a bit more space to expand into. There's still some dirt under my fingernails, as I don't wear gloves, not sure how much I'm affected by leaves of a datura plant rubbing my sweaty skin.

Officially, autumn has begun here. Yet Melbourne has its own seasons, frost not happening and causing trouble. While the days are getting shorter, and nights cold enough for a good night's sleep, no rain means only the strongest plants survive without care.

Geraniums and Vietnamese Mint seem most thirsty, happy to give the tomatoes some special treatment. I slowly get a hang of the variety of ways plants grow, which parts we use, how to train them, how to prune them. I hardly ever used compost from our plastic compost bins, instead harvested the bottom layer of our green manure box for dark, worm crawling soil.

My houso build some trellis for our tomatoes in the back yard, the front yard ones got some height from one of my sculptures, and then used the neighbouring rosemary as support. The first time I harvested tomatoes from the back yard I had ample supply for weeks (low demand still), but the vigorous way of its growth demands good guidance for plenty of harvest.

The patterns of growth vary. The shrubs, pineapple sage, rosemary, yarrow, grow strong once established. I had dozens of parsleys plants, competing and going to seed prematurely. The mustard grew too dense and attracted fungus. The mint captured some edges, competing with the succulents. I cut them back in favour of the mint.

The succulents show an amazing resilience. The gifted pallet planter box/ bench combination didn't really work for any herbs, the succulents are thriving. Some of weedy ones even flower, and would provide a simple low maintenance green cover for neglected patches of soil. Anyone can propagate succulents, especially those tending to grow fast.

The creepy-crawler kind of plants pose a different problem. We have an amazing green cover for our front fence made of some peas. Plants using support by the environment instead of growing a strong support don't always treat their mates nicely. Ivy conquers slow and steady. Peas seem unstoppable in strangling whichever plant their tentacles reach.

'My' side of the fence looks a bit bare after I cut back the peas, yet the smaller brugmansia plant showed an abundance of pink flowers after being disentangled. Fighting back survivalists like grasses, vines and prickly plants like raspberry takes some effort, but without 'natural selection' by human hand evolution goes in different directions.

I feel inspired by the idea of permaculture. Using compatible diversity to create low-maintenance, high yield patches. Honestly, I feel like lightyears away. I still feel like I learned an awful lot within two years of tending a tiny patch, maybe about 4 square metres.

Leafy greens totally outpaced my knowledge how to keep them healthy, productive and not seeding prematurely. While I missed out on parsley, swiss chard and mustard, at least compared to my ambitious expectations, I learned a valuable lesson how less is more. Mustard and parsley produce a prolific amount of seeds, which I spread deliberately and generously. Overcrowding happened, plants went into seeding mood, others went as food for fungi.

Some parts of the patch seem to be thriving enough to stay for good. Comfrey and mint seem hard to get rid of, but might need some water to establish for good. Rosemary seems indestructible once established, even with little to none additional watering. Yarrow and peppino thrive on warmth and watering, although yarrow seems happily to wait a while to grow strong once it has good view to the sun.

I introduced the most persistent weed myself: a native raspberry. It's root system has captured a decent spot in the patch. I'm well aware that whenever I pull its obvious growth above the surface its roots live on. It would be tempting to train it along one of my sculptures, but it takes plenty of attention to keep it where it should be.

Potatoes blow my mind. Last year, the yield wasn't too good (maybe the best plant was harvested by neighbours). So I found out that burying the plant in soil should produce more tubers. I planted some gone off potatoes from the pantry, as deep as possible. Once the green parts grew out, I buried them in soil, mulch and/or compost.

They share the planter box with some hot chillies. So far, only four out of eight of them survived in there, at least two of them flowering. They are not really companion plants, so I have to wait and see whether I'll get some chilli and some potatoes. If I pile more soil on the potatoes, it will bury the chillies, one plant is already half submerged.

Some of the soil came from the green manure compost, started about two years ago. About 5 to 10 cm of rich, black compost, thriving with worms has collected at the very bottom of the box used for it. Every now and then I use a shovel to break down the dried plant matter a bit more to ease decomposition.

I didn't fertilise the patch much. Besides maybe 2 litres of worm juice, and the same amount of carp fertiliser, only the comfrey leaves contributed to keep the soil rich. Plus a few mouse corpses. And random things like tea, hibiscus flowers, coffee sludge and other foods. In other words, I have no idea why the plants continue thriving.

It's hard to tell how much work this patch needs to stay healthy and somehow productive. Pruning tomatoes kept me busy in the last weeks, and during the long hot summer watering was essential. It feels mostly relaxing, and the details I encounter reward me lots. The variety of shades of green, the elegant scarlet pineapple sage flowers and the passion flower vine trained around the wooden arch provide me with simple entertainment and peace of mind in times of stress.

Happy days

A new week started. I forgot/forgave the confrontations of last week, cured the hangover from a nice party and the frustration about being snubbed by the last tram by lazing out. Inspired by listening about Whole Body Intelligence I promised myself to manifest an abundant week.

Keizo the cat woke me up around 6am. He hasn't spend many nights in my room, so I let him in and went back to sleep. Unlike many other days, I felt energised and happy to get up and find out what surprises the day holds. I focussed my intention on compassion, honesty and openness.

Despite the lousy weather, I went on a walk to check out a bizarre piece of street art for myself. (In case you wonder, it's a dildo and bottle of tomato sauce hanging over a power line in the manner of a pair of shoes).

On my way back home, I found out that some paid work is waiting for me. Despite the slow business, the working week starts usually at least half a day later than in most places trying to make money. If my boss wouldn't complain so much about financial problems, I wouldn't mind a slow start. I just don't think that neglecting business works to increase sales.

The kitchen had deteriorated into a mess, and despite not really liking cleaning it, my surprising happiness helped to offer doing it. After all, I probably would get paid, and it makes the work space more inviting. After an event this weekend, main priority was to get the prepping area back into a state which allows us to sell our goods.

I must have done this dozens of times, creating order out of chaos, transforming an obstacle course into open work spaces where it's easy and safe to move around. It wouldn't be rocket science to keep the place in working order, but after events it looks often like a bomb exploded and spread everything randomly around.

It took a while to get it back into shape, but I also noticed my boss being in one of his angry moods. 90s rock music often acts as reliable indicator for potential conflict. Dismayed by the unnecessary chaos, which subverts our idea of sustainability and being part of the solution, my balance on a high declined slowly.

Many clashes happened between me and my mate acting as boss, so I can easily analyse some of the skewed perceptions which allow for easy escalation. Like a well set mouse trap, he is triggered easily. One main trigger is miscommunication, mainly my inability to read his thoughts. Anger goes together with impatience, creating quite a vicious circle. If I don't react straight away, anger escalation happens. 

As an empath, I try to avoid hanging around people emanating anger or hate. In a state of openness, my chemistry synchronises with the people around me. This makes hanging out with supportive, loving and caring people extremely pleasurable. It's much less fun when people lose their shit and direct it towards me.

I carried lots of anger with me, until I started working more on myself and noticed many undesirable pattern in me. My body remembers enough angry confrontations to provide me with some default reactions. I learned to walk away from confrontation, but I can run with my rage as well. Whenever I do, I notice quite acute how toxic anger is. Depending on the intensity of conflict, it can easily take some hours or up to a good night's sleep to breath this detrimental cocktail out of my system.

So when I couldn't keep up with a change of my bosses mind, which happened in less than 15 minutes and wasn't communicated, I got shouted at and returned it in the same coin. I still feel the chemicals going together with anger reverberating in me. Being aware that empathy primed me to reactivate old, bad habits could have prevented escalation. 

What started as an unusual nice day turned into another day wasted in useless fights with my boss. At the moment, I can't just walk away from the job, unless I find a way to successfully promote my own business. I'm just more determined to listen more to my body not to lose my grounding the next time with a similar constellation. 

While my intention to convert the game of life into a fun game didn't manifest today, I will continue this process for at a week, before I file it as 'learning experience'. 

In the beginning

Life remains a big mystery for all involved. How did we get here, how did it all begin and where does it all lead to? Many people asked these questions, and entire societies emerged depending on the answers given. While current predominantly accepted answer to these big questions seem simple, they might reflect an unhealthy tunnel vision.

How did we get here? Coincidence. The universe acts like a giant quantum computer, pre-programmed with rule sets which randomly create systems of higher complexity. Basically Newton's clockwork universe revisited, full of inevitability and determinism.

How did it all begin? Big Bang. The strictly causal universe popped out of less than nothing into existence, without cause. While everything within universe seems to follow causal relationships, universe itself lacks any cause. In other words: The existence of universe, or its origin, kind of breaks the entire rule set valid within universe.

Where does it all lead to? Entropy. Everything deteriorates, transform from order into chaos. The entire universe will run out of fuel, and collapse in itself, popping as mysteriously and inexplicable out of existence as it emerged.

This big picture of things diminishes our existence, our individuality and our consciousness to nothing but an inevitable by-product of rule-based processes beyond our intentional influence. While this concept of reality has been promoted and believed lots, it doesn't really reflect what happens.

The three questions seem to go to the core of life, the universe and everything, yet from a perspective making our existence the centre of importance of the whole universe. These questions address the 'objects' of our thinking, without addressing thinking/observing itself.

This virtual conversation could not take place without consciousness. Any word, any thought just attempts to describe the experiences available to consciousness. Please allow yourself for a moment or two to live without a concise definition of consciousness, and trust your idea of it (at least as long as you believe that you're endowed with it).

Let me now propose 'consciousness' as primary 'substance' of our universe. Like the ocean consists of water molecules, consciousness consists of 'spirit' molecules, distinct yet closely linked. Our 'self', us being represents one droplet in the ocean of consciousness. Matter as we know it emerges as consequence of consciousness, never as its cause.

It might take a bit of contemplation to shift our perspective from materialistic, deterministic object based thinking towards process-focussed thinking. The word consciousness describes a process, yet the english language lacks the precision of specific terms for different states of this process. Dhyana, samadhi, satori can not be properly translated into the language of cultures which subscribed to materialistic fundamentalism.

The western culture replaced the quest for liberation, for moksha, with the illusion of personal liberty. Like in many areas, some cleverly installed maya (illusion) suggests already 'being there', no need to move deliberately into the direction of love, compassion and understanding. The Western culture has ostensibly reached the level of enlightenment about 2 centuries ago. No worries, mate, we totally got it.

If you grew up in a culture claiming to have descended from an 'enlightened' culture, it's easy to assume that the systems in place reflect enlightened ideas. Unfortunately, the existing systems of governance and economy fail to provide access for everyone to the abundance of resources our planet offers. The firm believe that the current world is the best possible, after a quasi linear development to excellence, hinders participation in individual growth and evolution of society.

From a process-focussed perspective, change of structures of society appears natural and inevitable. The very same evolving structures have rather quality of static snapshots, gradually adjusted towards more 'efficiency' when seen from a materialistic-deterministic perspective. Considering the lack of success in making this planet work for 100% of humanity using the current systems of society, restructuring society in radical new (old) ways seems the next potential evolutionary leap.

Before I leap to far ahead, I'd like to step back a bit to introduce my understanding of the process of evolution. Individual systems combine with other other systems towards higher complexity and diversity in order to succeed coexisting within an environment. From one-cellular beings via multicellular life forms evolution increased complexity and diversity of the biosphere of Mother Earth.

As an ongoing process on all levels of life and consciousness, comparing evolution to a race to the top, with humanity as its most important outcome, makes only little sense.  Everything permanently co-evolves. Humanity's attack on biodiversity tears holes in the web of life which endanger its own existence. The temporary madness in global human interaction, war, pollution, starvation only paves the path to a massive fall of so-called civilisation.

Unless we decide to organise our support systems in ways that work for 100% of humanity, to consciously evolve our communities and ourself, we have little chance to avoid witnessing the empire falling, and taking many with it. Understanding evolution as on-going process, and not merely as propaganda tool to justify a culture of domination, can facilitate shaping our evolution of society without creating unnecessary suffering.

Suchness

If you choose a life from the shelf

you'll block the path to your true self.

Life offers so much more variety,

than just to function in society.

Yet when your ego becomes your master,

life easily turns into a disaster.

The game of craving and aversion

prevents healthy energy conversion.

Once you tame that fearsome hungry beast

you will find true peace, at least.

You can stop swimming against the stream,

turning the re-occurring nightmare into a dream.

Don't be afraid to seek your art of living,

and life becomes the gift that keeps on giving.

Human nature

Language acts like a virus, especially once we enter the level of abstraction. While we might learn from General Semantics, or Rene Magrittes famous painting 'Ceci n'es pas une pipe', that even words describing tangible objects fail to capture the suchness of the worded item, abstractions lead us to a dive in truly murky waters.

We pave the road to misunderstandings elegantly when talking about all sort of -isms, as no-one can define those terms with authority and accuracy, albeit many claim to do exactly that. In most real life situations, people insist that 'everyone knows' what communism, socialism, capitalism, feudalism etc. means, and whether or not one abstract category fits into another.

Unless we become aware of the inherent inability of using language to describe our individual and shared experience, we are held captive in Plato's cave, and might easily get angry at those who have seen the light of day. That doesn't stop us from attempting to communicate verbally, and luckily in a majority of cases that still works out sufficiently for survival and even enjoyment.

Since Occupy Wall Street happened, the term 'human nature' became a highly popular confusing term to argue either for or against specific ways to organise society. Although all of us have our very own way of perceiving the world around us, and although language with its multiple levels of abstractions makes it challenging to pinpoint some agreeable ideas about 'human nature', I want to give it a shot.

The black-and-white perspective on human nature seems most popular, describing humans as inherently 'good' or inherently 'evil'. I guess most peoples experience rather shows them that some people act without the intent of harming others, and other do. Of course, even 'bad' people do some 'good', and vice versa. Using the black-and-white approach fails from the start to provide a framework that could be backed up by experience, no matter how much one wishes for people to fit into this worldview.

Modern psychology uses the Bell curve as a tool to describe the distribution of human traits. This approach seems much more appropriate to approach 'human nature' than the moralistic ideas lingering around in the dualistic approach of either 'good' or 'evil'.

Bell curve (normal distribution)

A lot of the categories we use in language compare to boxes, especially if we think in mutually exclusive categories (good/evil). Let's put the thinking in boxes aside for a while, and take the above image as a better representation of human nature, with potentially 'good' and 'evil' on the flat ends of the curve. If an axis 'willingness to do harm' exists in human nature, only a few percent fall into the extremes of psychopathy or saints, the rest will simply do whatever they perceive as 'normal'.

The origin of the idea of government, however, links back to the idea that humans can't be trusted, and need protection from each other. This meme spread first via religion (born in original sin), and was then happily reinforced by more secular forms of government which basically acted like parents for entire populations. The expressions 'fatherland' and 'motherland' remind us of the generally parental character of nationhood. 

As humans, we are individual expressions of consciousness, sui generis, and as such share some elementary needs. Besides that, we are pretty unpredictable most of the time, which makes life so interesting. A minority of humans lacks the ability of empathise, and therefor feels no remorse when harming others. How we can we deal with those individuals?

Keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. In tribal societies, shamans held the responsibility to identify those individuals, and prevent them from harming the rest of the group. People with psychopathic predisposition don't turn automatically into monsters, and can still fulfil useful functions within their community. You might have noticed the absence of shamans in modern society, which happened unlikely just coincidentally.

Without anyone in the position to identify and keep psychopaths in check, they can basically do whatever they like. After killing or removing shamans as safe guards for communities, they could spread fear with impunity. And they used the fear they spread to demand even more power and less control for themselves. 

Has anyone ever wondered why an individual murderer bears the full brunt of punishment society can offer, while president Obama signs off kill list as regular routine task? We live in a world run by psychopaths, which used violence to implement systems of government that create heaven on Earth for themselves and other psychopaths. Being only a minority, this means hell for the rest of us. 

As a majority of humanity can be described as relative gullible, they perpetuate this mad system that harms the rest of humanity, many other forms of life on this planet and the planet itself. This has several motivations. (hey, we're all individuals), which potentially collapse into the erratic believe that human nature is inherently 'good' or 'evil'. As long as we believe in the validity of this construct, psychopath will maintain control over the rest of the population.

If ones believe that we're inherently 'good', then she/he will fall for any intentional lie. If government harms the environment or other people, it is 'for the greater good'. If one believes that we're inherently 'evil', their fear will ask for protection, even from themselves. Just when one understands that we cannot generalise this aspect of human nature, the opportunity arises to reign in the psychopathic elements in society without converting it into a prison for all but the psychopaths.

Humans can adapt probably better than any other species to their environment. Humanity survived much longer without the illusion of government than with it. Well, maybe we managed to get to this historical water shed moment before, and just wiped out the memory of it by nearly extinguishing our species. We have seemingly unlimited learning potential, as individuals and as community. We can create a world that shares the resources of this planet, and allows 100% of humanity to survive and prosper. 

If we don't do it, the cosmos might giggle in schadenfreude about the failed human experiment, or feel sad about its end, or remain equanimous as the universe continues to exist.  

The state of confusion

Prelude

Humanity as a whole can only come so far,

If we repeat the cruel mistake of eternal war.

Right now, it seems like each and every nation

has been infected by a faulty idea of civilisation.

The crown of luxury (1/10)

Mother Earth offers us abundance,

A plenty that gives us the chance

to peacefully share its fruits,

while cherishing its divine roots.

Yet humanity, unaware of its role,

invented the game of control,

divided itself into the few and the many,

those who have all and those who don't have any.

While there's more than enough for everyone,

most humans suffers under the barrel of a gun,

We can't maintain our splendid opulence

without arbitrary and unjust violence

claim the few that occupy the tower of power,

trickling down on the many a golden shower.

Wisdom (2/10)

For the many, life became desperate,

daily survival as permanent struggle,

too many obligations to juggle

to hold onto the trust in one's own fate.

For the few, life became a game,

technology fulfilled surreal dreams,

or at least, so it seems

allowed living without any shame.

Yet others, who came here to stay,

just patiently walked the way,

leaving trails in the unknown,

where they slowly have grown.

With no need for fame and bling,

they just became part of everything.

Understanding (3/10)

Back to nature is the deceptive call,

for which we now easily fall.

If we want to save the planet's sanity,

we have to restrict the numbers of humanity!

Instead of learning more ecology,

let's just praise the natural theology

which declares humanity as enemy

and wants the big culling as remedy.

We can't share like this with all,

Let's kill some people to prevent the fall

into a world without clean water and air,

so that few can live on like this, ain't that fair?

But if 'like this' doesn't work out,

isn't 'like that' worth to try out?

Loving Kindness (4/10)

Life knows only winner

Death transforms the matter

to serve life again o so better.

The human race is only a beginner

in understanding the cycle of life,

that's why society seems such a strife.

If we base our world on competition

we harm ourself and the planet,

and we drown in our own net.

If we want life's completion,

we have to take power from the fool

and play again by nature's rule.

Mother Earth thinks it's alright

if humanity commits collective suicide.

Might (5/10)

It seems like we live in an age of reason,

The prophets of science guiding politics,

advising logically, not playing dirty tricks,

yet ignoring their heart is their biggest treason.

Wholeness still remains neglected,

which keeps thinking disconnected.

Without some inspired intuition

science just creates a scary vision.

We studied long how to kill each other,

even developed some insane will

for a mutual and complete overkill.

Yet if we don't start caring to bother

to integrate heart and soul in our thinking,

we'll happily watch our own ship sinking.

Beauty (6/10)

Humanity seems so ludicrously immature,

in its endless quest for more,

degrading our planet to a whore,

wanting to master Mother nature.

People are treated like cattle,

and we kill those who dare to rattle

on the cages of our needless slavery,

instead of following such bravery.

Hypnotised like a rabbit by a snake

we continue our fearful shake

believing it's a sign of integrity

to submit to imposed authority.

But we only have to answer one call -

the one that comes from the heart and soul.

Victory (7/10)

Many deeds of utter insanity

have been done in the name of rationality.

We still celebrate misunderstood genetics,

and largely misappreciate mimetic.

Instead of engaging in constructive dialogue,

we easily fall prey to any demagogue

who creates the air of mystery

by their own special version of history.

Most words of persuasion are mere empty shell

to disguise the reality of a living hell.

Spin doctors provide the final tweak

to create perfect Orwelian double-speak.

With meaning so readily and easily twisted,

as endangered our whole species is enlisted.

Acknowledgement (8/10)

If we give the wisest one control,

with the power to shape it all,

then everything would be fine,

society rescued from its steady decline.

Yet this is nothing but a fantasy,

an idea so incredibly stale

it doesn't even suit as fairy tale

it's a criminal intellectual heresy.

Because while we hope for a wise leader,

we simply follow the next best cheater.

One thing is certain, at least of today,

politics is nothing but a theatre play.

The moral doesn't even go very deep:

Following leaders makes you a sheep.

Foundation (9/10)

This civilisation isn't worth preserving,

it is build on falsehoods and lies,

controlled by a bunch of all-seeing eyes,

hell instead of heaven humanity is deserving.

We are all born to be free,

not to live in disguised slavery.

The system of human livestock management

has had its time, and it has to end.

We don't need to spill the baby with the bath,

many things we build on this path

will come with us into the future,

if they can be used for our nurture.

But bureaucracy, banking and government

only contributed to humanities detriment.

Kingdom (10/10)

I don't want to suggest haste,

but there's little time to waste.

We don't want to suffocate in pollution,

for most problems we have a clean solution.

The internet created the capacity

to weave a true global community,

to share all that we know

to tap into the cosmic flow.

Nature organises itself,

Let's keep the isms on the shelf

of humanity's primitive history

to finally shape our own destiny.

We don't need yet another revolution,

just commitment to a conscious evolution.

Bit for bit

Many people define 'consciousness' as nothing but the state they lose when they go to sleep, overdo substances or get severely injury by accident or violence. Somehow this negative definition suggests that we humans are either conscious or unconscious, which sounds to me like delusional, wishful thinking.

Psychologists would rather claim that we spend quite a limited time 'fully conscious', our sub-consciousness controlling the majority of our activities. Depending what you know or believe about your own subconsciousness, the idea of acting subconscious most of the time might induce quite a lot of fear.

Western societies don't value thinking about thinking and most forms of self-reflective activity very high. Although we all have a mind, only specialists are entitled and encouraged to figure out how these minds work. Yet in everyday business, our minds are mostly driven by our subconscious believes, and rationalise our behaviour after it happens.

The concepts explaining subconsciousness don't appeal too much to regular people, as they seem rather overly complex (Freud) or pretty far out (Jung). After all, all we need to do is to somehow 'soldier on', 'get on with our lives', 'make a living', 'function in the modern world', right?

Yet subconscious drives especially those unaware of it, or touchy to think about it. Education conditions us to 'mind our own business', and leave the business of the mind to dedicated specialists. This opens the door to easy manipulation, and maintains the state of learned helplessness most people suffer from.

So we can embrace the suggestion to be 'in control' of our own lives, only dependent sometimes to those who know ourselves better than we can ever do. If our experience contradicts the promises of 'experts', it can hardly be their fault, something must be wrong with us. And the experts can fix it - if not straight away, then not because they have other interests than our own best at heart, but surely because we're much wronger than we should be.

Any sort of logical system needs a solid foundation to reflect the reality of our own experience, otherwise it creates a life on its own. An idea or concept gone wild might provide us with entertainment, enjoyment, solace, yet it can hide the truth of our existence from us. Whenever we believe something without any personal evidence, we might get deluded into illusion about reality.

Humans are born to be curious, that's one of my personal believes I found plenty of evidence of. I think Truth fails to be described in words, it rather unveils itself in actions and artefacts of existence. When we observe objects falling towards the earth, very consistently, 'gravity' turns into one of those inexplicable truths. Birds and insects defy this principle, but that doesn't need to worry us, as they obviously do something to defy this principle - yet luckily, they land sometimes, and stop doing what they did, so we can investigate how they temporarily manage to counteract the attraction of our spaceship Earth.

The brothers Montgolfiere and the Wright brothers had to sustain through much ridicule for their idea that even humans could manage to defy gravity and float within the atmosphere. Luckily, the combination of astute observation and curiosity advanced technology a bit further, flicking a collective binary switch on - humans can fly, without any magic involved.

The oldest form of flight technology I know of didn't make any inventor famous though. A simple boomerang still manages not only to blow my mind, but those of many others as well. Newton's physics would have trouble describing its flight path, which might explain as well explain why the inventors of the Montgolfiere and the plane had to fight so much resistance.

'Modern' people know that planes exist, and maybe also that boomerangs fly in surprising ways. Most of us hardly know why and how, and wouldn't be able to construct or build either of them. It just doesn't give us a fright when we see them, our subconscious tells us it's possible and we don't need to worry.

We got used to the sun and stars staying in their orbits as well, continuous observation allowed to us to let go of the fear of the sky collapsing on us. Predictability became our friend, and science helped those curious to grasp bits of the why and how, and those less curious could rest in the solace that no magic was involved to make it happen.

The word 'magic' though does already unpredictable things to the minds of english speaking people, activating an essential binary switch in our subconsciousness. We tend to organise our experience around the concept of 'real' and 'illusionary', a imaginary binary concept shown as relatively irrelevant by quantum mechanics and buddhism.

The virus language (thanks Laurie Anderson) often creates binary concepts that defy our experience, while acting as cornerstones to our logic. Yet as social beings, we don't enter the world of our experience as blank slates, but informed by the ideas of our ancestors, transmitted by language and the culture we're born into.

The amount of 'bits' of information in any given sentence is potentially infinite, and neither sender nor receiver usually have any clue about much information is transmitted. If we take a popular way to construct a sentence expressing something meaningful, 'A is B', we already open the door to multiple interpretations.

'God is great'. Many people will not only find this sentence meaningful, but also containing Truth. On a semantic level, however, it turns into something with little to no value at all. I don't want to open a can of worms with discussing the terms 'God' and 'great', when I hear any sentence of the 'A is B' type the incompleteness flag of my subconsciousness gets raised.

Aristotle left humanity with some basic ideas about binary logic, we might consider him as one of the first computer scientists in history. Like all abstract concepts, Aristotelian logic simplifies reality in order to obtain 'higher' levels of knowledge. But when we mistake his map for the territory, we become susceptible to be remote controlled by anyone understanding the binary nature of our subconsciousness to create our analogue experience.

When we see an image on a TV or computer screen, we might be aware of the underlying binary construction of it, but depending on the quality of the image, we can happily immerse ourselves in the illusion created by it. Salvatore Dali elegantly demonstrated his understanding of human perception with images that change from a collection of random dots into 'meaningful' shapes in a distance, long before most people got hypnotised by the illusion of moving images composed of a random collection of dots.

Similarly we can stay oblivious to the binary nature of our subconsciousness, and enjoy the speed in which we can react without thinking. The ability the process information subconsciously at high speed definitely contributes to individual survival - faced with a wild animal, philosophical considerations warrant usually fast death.

In our 'civilised' times, life and death situation became luckily rare. In most parts of world, dangerous animals have been extinct, so technology exposes us to the biggest threats to our survival. However, while we live potentially the most sheltered life in known history, the idea of life-threatening situations seem to have increased exponentially.

According to Leary's 8-circuit model of human consciousness, the evaluation into 'save' and 'not save' constitutes an elementary switch in our subconsciousness. This evaluation usually happens neither rational nor objective, yet subconsciously based on our prior experience. If we made 'bad' experiences with approaching a dog, for example, in an early state of our life, we will most likely turn out be a 'cat' person, and when given a choice for a pet unlikely choose a dog.

While dogs can be dangerous in certain cases, most of them are quite harmless. Our subconscious programming, however, doesn't act rational, but automatic. Unless we use efficient methods to change it, it will retain any conditioning ever acquired. While this might sound somewhat overwhelming, it also offers with it the understanding that we might access much more 'information' than we can imagine in our wildest dreams.

Exactly there, in our dreams, we can find a glimpse of the opportunities inherent in our subconscious. A nearly perfect virtual reality happens while our body lays down sleeping, appearing as intensely real like our waking life. Our pineal gland emits DMT and we dance with the dream fairies. While millions of bits of sensual information travel through our nervous system, our attention focuses on a specific set of circumstances, and filters the rest. This 'rest' comprises a large part of the dream scenery.

Not everyone has memories of their dreams, yet we dream every night when we enter a REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase in our sleep. Obviously, the 'input' to our dream awareness doesn't come from our senses. While the complexity of dreams worlds doesn't look like composed in a binary fashion, it just would need sufficient amount of binary data and high processing speeds. Billions of neuron, each of which might be just a binary switch or even something like a megabyte memory unit, with up to 10000 connections between each other, provide both - large memory area and processing speed.

The locus of individual memory items (engrams) has not been located. If we have a holographic memory, engrams potentially leave traces in a variety of different locations. The orientation of our attention brings memory back to awareness, not necessarily as precise recording of the events that happened, rather as current interpretation of the event itself. As we get mostly educated by permanent repetition, our episodical memory is in average quite prone to error regarding specific details. The same event seen by different people can yield description which tell entirely different stories.

In other words, each of us has a different binary pathway through the filters we acquired in our lifetime. Our reality tunnels, in Robert Anton Wilson's words, distort the space-time event we witness. Unless we understand and detect the patterns we use to generate our 'reality', we cannot de-activate the filters, although drugs might temporarily de-activate them. Opening the doors of perception doesn't provide you with super powers, and learning to shutting them at will is as important as the initial opening.

Yet we can learn to observe our thinking, to get to know the filters through which we create our reality. Don't expect to enter an unfiltered existence, just enjoy the shift of perspective whenever you flicked a binary switch of your subconscious that distorted your perception of reality.

Sinking

The people travel

from here to there

coming 

going

Their destination

reverses itself

over and over again

The Tao remains firmly

planted in one place

and yet cannot be left behind

Four kings guard

East, West, North and South

The paths they guard

are precious

and cannot be separated

Each has a colour

that can't be blended

Each has a sound

that can't be imitated

The center remains still

It has no colour or sound

yet the rest could not exist

without it 

Occupations of the occupy movement

It's long after the 'get a job' phase of the occupation of public space. For more than three months now, the local occupation had its ups and downs, yet is still swinging. 'Job' is quite a terrible word, and 'work' is mostly simiarly ill reputed. Gen Y and Z just love to chill and watch the world go by.



Of course, generalisations are generally wrong, and before I get accused of ageism I want to point out that I met revolutionary work horses of all ages, as well as incapable people. The level of engagement reflects personal attitudes, motivations and skills, and the proficiency of any task done depends on the right mix of those.

Before I get philosophical, I want to describe the 'roles' within occupy that seem special. To avoid people how do nothing else but decision making (also nown as leaders) this process is outsourced to the entire community effected. To allow this transition, the dominance of leadership is replaced by facilitation by the moderator team.



Facilitation is nothing new, the process of non-violent conflict resolution as described, implemented and exemplified by Marshall Rosenberg existed most likely in many society that considered themselves civilised. Humans need social contact to better organise the daily survival requirements, and if we were like wolves to each other, we would have extinguished our species long ago.

Facilitation describes the process of helping people to communicate better. It has the power to connect parties that used to kill and hate each other, and I think it even has the power to end the political economical domination that endangers the health of Mother Earth and of mankind. It's a simple process, yet requires individual skill and/or talent.



I've seen many different people in their 'role' as facilitator, with highly differing qualities. It takes only little for a 'weak' moderation team to be derailed, and many blame 'the process' for this outcome. Unless the facilitators embody the process, we cannot really decide whether the process works or not. In a way, it's their personal responsibility to be a shining example of respect and compassion for everyone, combined with good listening and communication skills.



Luckily, people get mostly inspired by example. As long as a team of five facilitators gets their act together, the magic of group flow to find consent in a GA happens easily. Dissenters can get heard, without having the impression of being forced to conform. I have experienced some fabulous examples of facilitation, and many dreadful ones. Those exposed to less inspiring examples often call for the process to be improved.

In this emerging movement many roles exist only for a short time, depending on the requirements for specific projects. Many tasks don't require special skills, or some that can be learned quite fast. We have to accept the obsolescence of most 'jobs' that exist today. Crafts and their related skills will never come out of fashion, but talking a hapless victim on the phone into a new energy supplier contract, or defending the same person against the energy corporation's 'ownership fee' when transferring a contract might not be needed in the long run.

Occupy Everything

Rubber bullet to the head, Oakland, Oct 26 2011

The speed of events left me a bit breathless, tuned into the surge of adrenaline that wavers around the globe since the occupation gained momentum. The evictions in Melbourne, Sydney, Athens, Oakland, Chicago and of course London and NYC have become a talking point in Social media.

The narratives between spectators and 'official' commenters diverges in bizarre ways. Where ever the movement had some time to teach its participants the rules of the process, the moral bankruptcy of the 'leaders' became bloody apparent. Pushing, choking, punching, kneeling on necks, tear-gassing, dragging on hair and limbs, shooting rubber bullets, riding horses into people describes the means with which 'governments' sought conversation with a dissenting public.

When we watch a documentary about civil right movements of the past we hardly get an impression about the time it takes to peacefully shift society towards more justice. Pensions, health insurance, voting rights for woman, indigenous people or descendants of slaves, decriminalisation of homosexuality weren't implemented by reasonable, benevolent politicians but came into existence due to the non-violent resistance against blatant injustices. It just took a bit longer than the average attention span for a movie to happen.

Although Australia claims 'fair dinkum' as a part of her national identity, the desire for justice seems universal. The occupy movement continues the long struggle to liberate mankind from its unchosen leaders, and as their reign of terror and oppression spans the entire planet, the whole world gets involved.

Amazingly, although no leaders emerged, the movement has developed a huge global solidarity, and many voices say similar things in different words. Participatory democracy, self-organisation, the end of wars is possible when people want to work together for that aim. Yet these 'goals' have less overall importance than the means used to achieve them: The process of non-violent communication.

I admit that it takes time to learn and embody this process, and decision-making seems much slower than in hierarchies. The need for speed, however, brought this planet to the brink of an ecological collapse - maybe slowing down prevents sinking into the abyss our society heads towards. Yet those people who learned to interact, talk, decide and live non-violently have tasted the beauty, fun and power of this way of life.

Community turned for them from a buzzword enforcing conformity into a living experience, capable of tackling a variety of practical problems. According to their preferences, different workgroups for different tasks emerged, in which the same process of consensual decision making happens. Working together as equals and the useless violence created a durable bond. 'Leadership' isn't an important task, which didn't stop many to ask for it.

In Melbourne, a small, functioning society emerged, providing exchange of ideas, some free goods, a library, tuition for many aspects of daily life. In six days. Then the Lord (Mayor Robert Doyle) used his mighty fist to smash this fledgling approach to real democracy, to a world without leaders.

No more wars, no more unnecessary starving, no more slavery - does that really sound so scary?

One of the programs to maintain unaccountable power creates the habit of uniting against a common enemy. On the surface, the occupy movement appears as yet another one of those anti-everything but the whales airy-fairy hippie bullshit. Or rather, this portrait creates a decent niche in which to scare the movement. It ignores the diversity of support from various levels of society, intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Leslie Cannold, entertainers like Keith Olberman, as well as lesser known people from all walks of life, including bankers and politicians.

Banksy installation in front St. Paul's, London

When I spend my time on a self-chosen duty as troll patrol for #occupymelbourne, I often hear that 'you people/hippies/commis/lefties/other insults don't represent me'. I can hear a wish for representation in there, and that's one of things the movement offers. Not in the traditional sense of giving up your voice but by providing an open space for everyone to be heard.

I consider the 'trolls' as my friends, and encourage them to make their voice heard on the next general assembly. First and foremost, I learn about my own reactivity to adversity, and to pause before engaging in troll patrol. Respect exists among friends, yet positions of authority and power predetermine the levels of respect expected and acted out.

I wanted to tweet 'One of the big mysteries of our times - does the Queen wipe her own bum?', yet decided against it. Maybe I need to decode myself more, however, she looks like a nice, old lady, and I respect her as such no matter how little her title means to me. After all, she might still live after the revolution, maybe even in Buckingham Palace. If the royal family finds enough supporters to squat the Palace, hardly anyone should object to this group of people self-organising in that space.

While I'm typing here, today's second wave of police violence erupts in Oakland. I checked the live feed from this morning, shocking. The Nazi had gas chambers, the police in the US throws gas grenades into crowds of peaceful people while wearing gas masks. The images from the protest become more surreal, 1984 available on your doorstep or through youtube.

However, that's also part of the predictive programming you can learn about by studying products of the entertainment industry. We have seen the images of riots in movies, and were trained to obey orders from authority. After the apocalypse, as first step a new government is elected, suggesting the innate need to be a sheep. We don't want a total breakdown of society, that's just the scare tactic from paranoid leaders.

Greed requires power structures to grow into a cancer of society. I understood the message of the GA in Berlin to the world as a determined call to heal this planet from the wounds inflicted by the unaccountable abuse of power the bureaucratic systems have created. Our current leaders simply don't care about this planet, they sent troops and drones in parts they don't live in, sell out indigenous people for the exploitation of natural resources, which mostly includes irreversible damage to well-established eco systems, while demanding us to pay for these non-sensical policies a higher and higher price.

While the planet might be healed, as well as mankind, as well as each individual, the system can't. We need to build a new one. The means of doing so matter more than the results. Nobody can predict the future, although politicians and economists talk often extremely prophetic. There can't be any promise that this experiment succeeds. However, self-organisation maintains the balance of all natural systems around us, so let's try this evolutionary successful strategy for humanity.

Don't get the illusion that this experiment is just a talk fest. Communication is essential, yet many things get done as well. In a different style than in the streamlined job slots for wage slaves, yet amazingly efficient.

No matter how often I referred to 'we', I'm not representing the Occupation Movement. I can only speak for myself, and I hope that sharing my thoughts and ideas finds some common ground.

The time-binding capacity or energy of man (no matter what time is—if it is), which is unique to man, is a most subtle complex; it is the highest known energy and probably has many subdivisions. Ears are sensitive to the vibration of the air. Eyes are sensitive to the more subtle vibrations of light; in a similar way, the time-binding apparatus is sensitive to the most subtle energies; besides which it has the capacity to register not only all of our sensations but also the time-binding energies of other people; and it apparently has the capacity to register the energies of the universe.

Intelligent life in the universe



Sometimes, life seems like a never-ending puzzle, with millions of pieces, ever changing and never completing. The missing pieces of the puzzle only open up the next level of experience, and hardly ever lead to insights into tidbits of truth worth memorising in stone.

Yet, some artefacts made of stone survived millennia to tell us about the human past. Carving stone takes more time, skill and effort than writing a blog entry, yet in comparison to the latter, has proven more reliable to survive the changing tides of human evolution.

Our current civilisation, emerged and shaped by the childhood of humanity, might leave its legacy with the Georgia Guidestones, lots of plastic and radioactivity. The net as living, collective historian of the evolution of mankind might not survive as long as the Sphinx or smaller morsels of information cast in stone.

The collective mind of today seems rather insane - not hopelessly and incurably insane, yet more and more dangerously insane. Human curiosity doesn't stop to ask about its origin, its heritage. The myth provided by the consensual reality of (western) societies might contribute to this collective confusion.

Science currently dominates the myth making game in the Western World, yet the revolutions in scientific thinking of the 20st century haven't been transferred into the common meme pool. Let's shortly wrap the scientific narrative about the origin of man.

About 14 billion years the Big Bang happened, with really strange things happening in the very first few moments (a second or so), until all matter drifted away from each other, shaping stars, planets, galaxies and so on. The chemical elements we know of were created by fusing hydrogene, stars breed all the stuff we see around us. Due to our metabolism every atom in our body will be replaced within about seven years, we are literally made of star dust.

According to contemporary scientific belief, chemical 'life' differs drastically from human life (and I totally agree). However, the clay humans animate, has a long story attached to it, actually an extra-terrestial story. It might blunt Occam's razor a bit to prefer the complex cosmology with Big Bang and all, and disregard God's six day job of creating the universe 6000 years ago, but then, I'm convinced by the evidence presented in favour of this ancient, maybe even rusty universe.

Wikipedia states the age of our planet as four and half billion years, so each and every atom found on this planet had spend already billions of years floating though space before ending up in human bodies, cars, computers and pizza. Earth started off very hot-tempered, a bubbly metal core spew various elements onto a slowly solidifying crust.

During this time, this planet got hit by a large celestial object, and lost some of its mass to give birth to the moon. The continuing volcanic activity build the foundation for an atmosphere, the impact of other objects made of ice most likely contributed to the abundance of water we still enjoy today.

When life started exactly remains unknown, somewhere between 2.5 and 4 billion years ago. It developed in the ocean surrounding Pangaea, the massive single continent that broke up about 250 million years ago. Humans or their ancestors missed out on this super-continent, and made their appearance between 1.5 to 6 million years ago. For at least a million years or so, hairless, upright walking members of human family know how to control fire, inventing their own ways to transform energy.

Homo sapiens sapiens, the name given to the current evolutionary phenotype of time-binding humans, exists for about 200,000 years, according to Wikipedia 'history proper' began about 8000 years ago in the region known as 'Middle East'. My head buzzes with all the numbers, especially when I attempt to bring our 'knowledge' about the universe and mankind into a consistent picture.

We distinguish different species by their genetic outfit, and all humans share a similar DNA structure. Homo sapiens sapiens has shared this planet with other human species, another bit of evidence pointing to evolution as law of nature. The methods to look back into time we have at the moment have limits, as organic material deteriorates usually very fast.

Cultural forms to transmit historical information let us stitch back a sketchy picture of something like the last two millennia, yet merely a couple of hundred years with more reliability and credibility. Although the principle of 'scientific objectivity' never dominated among any documented society, we assume that historic scribes did exactly act like this, and reported 'truthfully' about the events around them.

I tend to believe that signal/noise ratio of 'historical' information goes along a Bell-curve, and any source needs a healthy dose of skepticism. Veracity seems of little importance in mass media reporting, and facts rarely make headlines. The field of history represent rather a story collecting than a fact detecting human endeavour. The diversity of explanations around the events of September 11 2001 typifies the amount of story-telling emerging after an cataclysmic event.

We can hardly claim to know for sure what happened in the last ten years, so speculations about events spanning hundreds or even billions of years back can't be considered as facts. Written history, the way we understand it in 2011, only captures a tiny aspect of the adaptions of evolution the human race experienced so far. Yet any group of people has oral traditions telling about their origins.

Many of these creation myths vanished from memepool, many others survived in different shape and forms. As we 'know' the true story, Big Bang and all, studying those old stories can't provide any more useful parts connecting to the puzzle of human existence. All this talking about Gods obviously indicates a naive, pre-civilised concept of reality.

Yet some facts from the past remain unexplained. Many civilisation mastered technology in ways we can't explain or recreate with today's methods. The pyramids demonstrate amazing engineering skills thousands of years before the advent of the computer, which nowadays assists the construction of awe-inspiring mega-structures.

One explanation given for some marvels of the past includes extraterrestrial visitors. Do aliens exist?

I don't know. Yet many stories about aliens exist, and some of them quite old. A friend made me curious by talking repeatedly about UFOs, and so I went on a quest to find out more. I was told an eyewitness account of a sighting, and had a distant sighting myself some time later, but hadn't bothered investigating this phenomenon in the collective story pool of the WWW.

From a scientific point of view, the existence of life outside our tiny planet has a high probability. Astronomers have begun identifying solar systems with planets, and the sheer number of the billions of galaxies with billions of stars indicate how little we really know about our universe. We love the metaphor of the needle in haystake, yet the needle Gaia hides in the haystake Milkyway, which makes finding life elsewhere tricky.

Contemporary science has little ideas how to explain interplanetary travel, and shows little interest in considering visits from outer space. The level of xenophobia seems rampant in the 21st century, and if someone won't open their heart to an 'alien' member of their own species, they would hardly welcome visitors from other planets.

And when in doubt, ask Hollywood. The majority of movies warns about dangerous aliens, so we better avoid hoping for their arrival. Just like the real existing US empire they will invade this planet mercilessly to destroy infrastructure, rob resources and enslave us. Hmm, sounds like the evil aliens have already won the battle, but let's rewind for a second.

Humanity hardly tipped its toes into the ocean of the Milky Way, so swimming like a dolphin in it to master interplanetary travel requires some advanced technology. Mankind brought much suffering among itself by using technology for military purposes. The childhood of humanity looks cruel, bloody, savage from a conscious point of view. Technology fuelled the game of war, trying to establish fear into the nature of the human race.

Anyway, it's too late to be afraid, it seems like the aliens have already reached us. Unless they control the  33 bloodlines running the economic matrix of this planet, they seem to be friendly. Otherwise, the gap in technology should have seen this planet obliterated easily, according to Buzz Aldrin.

More thoughts on this topic will come. Wouldn't it be a great PR stunt if some UFOs hovered over the royal wedding today? A bigger life audience can hardly be reached soon....

History in the making

The only thing human beings know for sure is their own history, at least if you follow along the ideas of Giambattista Vico. History needs the luxury of culture, a feature of humanity reinvented in many parts of the planet for millennia. The roots of civilisation date further and further back. Each of them deployed our inventive consciousness to create technological progress and an increase of available resources for their inhabitants.

Until lately, civilisations barely had the means to cooperate on larger scales. Few decided over the fate of many, creating the mess we witness today. Profit-driven wars rage, profit-driven paranoia sells stupid security measures, and thousands starve daily on this planet that can feed every human being. When natural disasters devastated the livelihoods of other people, a global wave of helpers emerge. Statistically, there are much more people willing to help than those who want to harm, society functions only by cooperation. 

History does not contain 'facts', merely narratives. September 1st 1939 does not tell us anything about the chains of connections and events that led to the second World War. We can learn about patsies, false-flag operation and propaganda that typically appear as side-effect in preparation for pre-emptive warfare by investigating the memetic structure of the surviving artefacts of any given period of the past. History taught in schools and universities serves only as propaganda to protect the inane power structures governing the majority of people against their best interests. 

Now we don't need to watch any BBC documentary about WW2 anymore to understand how governments operate to make money out of war and violence. We can witness the conspiration happening with international diplomacy wikileaking into the public domain. It's no longer a conspiracy that governments conspire behind the back of their citizens, it's happening right here and right now on this very planet.

Democracy can not just base on trust into its representatives. Democracy needs transparency up to the highest levels. Whenever 'secret' documents from the distant past were unveiled, abuses of power became known. Each government comments fast that these wrong-doings are a thing of the past. In the light of wikileaks the continuity of nefarious activities of democratically elected governments becomes obvious. Control of government failed until now, only a truly open government suits democracy.

Wikileaks has provided a glimpse of transparency, so we can experience history in the making. Its founder Julian Assange made himself the target of malevolent governments, and the empire strikes back.  Charged with dubios allegations, chased by police throughout Europe, held for a couple of days in isolation, Assange walks in the steps of Rosa Parks. 

On a very short term notice, you might want to join the rally in Melbourne today 5:30 pm at the State Library. Let's document history in making from as many perspectives as possible, to prevent state propaganda ruining our minds.

Evolution and human history

We live in amazing times, and always have. The basic need for food and shelter exists for as long as humans roam this planet. Even in the 'modern' world with all its technological complexity and vast knowledge mankind hasn't conquered this challenge sustainably, not because it cannot be done but because  of insanity.

Human memes spread wider and faster than those of any other species known to us. Our story telling ability provides the basis for progress, an evolutionary phenomenon that creates dynamically balanced complex systems.  Contemporary science and craft still hasn't been able to recreate technological marvels of the human past, and the ideas of how people lived in previous eras of history often base on sketchy evidence.

As social beings, survival of humanity depended rather on an evolution of group organisation strategies than advancing the bio-physical machinery of individuals. Different environments favoured different strategies of how people live together, cultural exchange added into the mix. One might question the meaning of his/her individual existence, but the group with its customs, rules, traditions and myths seems to make sense, as it seems to last longer than any of its individual members.

When ever more people live together in smaller spaces, when ever urban culture emerges, art and technology advance, yet not in a linear fashion. Complexity of society adds to its vulnerability, especially the way it generates and uses energy. Deforestation killed many cultures, and the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq secure the US future oil-based energy demands. The lack of sustainability and efficiency of a fossil-fuel economy is known already at least since Buckminster Fuller. Investing the resources in securing a useless mode of operation instead of devising more sustainable solutions appears to me utterly insane.

I can imagine the better-off part of society marvelling about the technological wonders and wondering about the future ahead of them in most times of history. With the need for food and shelter satisfied, story telling becomes the main occupation of humans. Humans devised amazing ways to utilize the resources of their environment, and many ideas spread around the globe.

A progressive society provides change much faster than the seasons that determined the life of many of our ancestors. Travel and communication technology have advanced like never before in known history, yet the structure of the mixed global societies looks similar to those in times of mass self-destruction.

The amount of people that could communicate together found its limits in societal, cultural and foremost spatial barriers. That limits the amount of ideas to choose from, 'best practice' simply meant doing anything in a way that worked somehow. Funny enough, Victoria's desalination plans seems as if the deciders never considered solutions from other parts of the globe, instead they use a strategy that doomed many societies.

The way evolution is taught and commonly portrayed unfortunately rather obscures evolutionary principles than allows us to take a bit more active part in it. It makes a lot of sense to consider developments in technology and society from an evolutionary perspective, and this makes it so much easier to perceive evolution as an ongoing instead of a relatively finished process.

Societies have always organised themselves, yet mostly only a minority within society acted as agents of this process of self-organisation. It doesn't really matter that not all ideas to structure society had something original to them. The diversity of concurrently existing and past societies simply indicated the lack of a 'natural' law about how conscious individuals organise their common affairs. Those indigenous cultures that survived until today lasted for much longer than any specific 'nation' or 'society', and proved thereby that mankind can survive without 'civilisation'. I have a good laugh at the idea that something as virtual and malleable as 'culture' can be deemed 'unchangeable', yet many fundamentalists might get angry about my bout of humour.

The 'us versus them' meme comes with the myth of any nation, and many other gangs of humans. It survived easier and longer than any technological advancement that could provide for the essential human needs. Mankind created technology to extinguish the entire species, and as a trade-off developed amazing life-saving technology.

Evolution seems to favour the 'us and them' idea. No species exists in isolation, only bacteria might happily survive on a purely an-organic diet. Ecology taught us to consider life more from a system perspective, and to study the interaction and interrelation of all species existing in a biotop. Have we cultivated plants and animals, or have these species adapted to us to selfishly spread their own genes around the globe?

Nature doesn't need humans to sustain life, it existed before and will exist after our species' expiry. The special role of humans on this planet, a meme popular with scientists, philosophers, artists and priests alike, has no basis in our current understanding of evolution. Wait, humans can master evolution of non-biological systems, and even their own, but as yet this meme hasn't reached many members of our species.

No society managed to 'stay on the top' throughout history, yet many still try. No strategy to organise society won the 'battle of civilisations'. Many species got extinct, yet the number of evolutionary winners  exceeds most peoples imagination. The evolution of ideas about the organisation of society show the same random variety as any experimental setup in the lab of life.

In an era of global travel and communication violent government doesn't make any sense anymore. Simple birth proves the evolutionary right to exist, no matter how hard bureaucracy may try to withdraw the means of survival for unwanted human beings. If everybody would want to live a meaningless and parasitic life like most professional scaremongers do, our planet would run out of resources within a very short amount of time. While violent governments needs individuals who combine greed, gullibility and recklessness, a sane society would rather offer those misguided individuals treatment than permit them to run the show.

Yet the Western World, conditioned to believe in the myth of enlightenment, shows little interest in a sane society. Although having power and acting responsibly are not mutually exclusive, without scrutiny representatives of government have always abused power. Most of the corrupt and irresponsible activity remains hidden under the cloak of 'national security' or 'public private partnership'. Corruption remains a much too successful business meme to undergo moral considerations. Corruption among politicians protects this mechanism from the law and public eye.

The way any society evolved doesn't represent any precipice, at least as far as I know. That doesn't stop politicos maintaining the myth to represent the best of societies by exclusion (claiming other societies offer less), This makes as much sense as saying because kangaroos have conquered Australia, all marsupials should be roos. Understanding that any living system (and I consider memes as living systems as well) evolves together with its environment means embracing diversity instead of enforcing conformity.

Any society defends some of its behaviour rules vigorously, while other behaviours are happily tolerated. It's okay in many western nations to show murderers and killings as part of story telling, yet real dead people are hardly seen. Unlike in Thailand, where graphic images of crime victims embellish the front pages of news papers. All groups of people developed some idiosyncratic ways of dealing with sex and death, deriving many other rules in accordance to this attitude to these essentials of life.

Again, the diversity of rules merely shows evolution in action. Progress seems like a by-product of the evolution of consciousness, and the consequences often favor only a minority of the human species. Yet progress as it manifests today would allow to feed and shelter every human being on this planet, if the splintered global societies wanted to. This doesn't imply some sort of welfare planet at all - yet the global free riders (politicians) like to perpetrate the myth that wealth leads to procrastination and decadence. Indeed, any society with considerable wealth and without control over their leaders ended in catastrophe or revolution. Violent government breeds intolerance, war, terrorism, murder, abuse, addiction and desperation.

Unfortunately, other forms of government hardly make it into the public consciousness as they can easily fall victim to the expansion lust of violent governments.  In retrospect, Saddam's Iraq before 1991 looks far more tolerant and secular than the US or Australia today, although dissidents held as political prisoners might survive longer with Western-style torture and imprisonment. Like after WW2, the US simply adapted the inhumane treatment of other people as demonstrated by the evil regime that got replaced. Of course, known wars hardly ever involved non-violent governments. Iraq just serves as example that comparing society standards can yield surprising results, and unveils the hypocrisy of fingerpointing, especially from the US government.

Rebranding war as insanity poses a huge challenge. From a global perspective, war creates losses by its unsustainable nature. Mankind needs protection, but not from our evil neighbours, mankind needs to protect itself from violent governments. Mankind shares one planet, and if mankind is willing to use evolution in its favour towards a more compassionate world it needs to cooperate to create sane forms of government.

Modern history creates the illusion of a relative linear development of mankind. The chaotic co-existence of different approaches of living together seems to scare those who live off collective fears. In the history of evolution diversity proved as advantage, and many forms of life simply vanished. The meme of violent government seems obsolete, yet still irresistible for many. And while it's popular not to expect 'historic' changes within one's lifetime, I have witnessed too many to lose my hope to see a much more just and compassionate planet than we have right now.

evolution exist global government history human ideas life live mankind meme myth people planet seems society species survive systems technology together violent war

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