MOTHER'S COLD RESOLVE

April 15th, 2021

The Permian-Triassic extinction, which took place 252 million years ago and which has the moniker “The Great Dying”, resulted in the total elimination of 90% of Earth’s species.  Geologists don’t really know what happened.  It could have been an asteroid that hit the planet, it could have been a sulphuric cloud cover caused by volcanoes.  But what we can be certain of is that it was due to completely natural factors.

Compare this to the times we live in now.  Anxiety abounds about our powers and our continual work to ruin the planet within the ideal vision that we would call ‘natural’.  But, remember exactly what natural means.  Natural resulted in 90% of Earth’s species being snuffed out of existence a few hundred million years ago - that was Mother Nature’s handiwork.  

It’s without a doubt that human activity is causing significant alterations to the planet’s atmosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere.  We have given birth to an endless array of chemicals that are having all sorts of third and forth order effects that we can barely keep up with, and our hell bent use of fossil fuels continues to wrap the planet in a warmer sheet of sky.

It’s a bit ironic to realize that humans are the result of natural processes.  Mother Nature created us, and anything we do, any of the ways that we alter the planet are ultimately, the result of natural processes.  It actually isn’t too much different than any of the mass extinctions that have occurred before modern history.  Except of course for one small detail.

This time, something on the planet is aware of what is going on.  The magnitude of this detail cannot be overstated.  Just ponder for a moment the obliviousness of all animals that came before us when they were facing extinction.  Did any of them have a solid grasp of the larger picture and what was going on?  Doubtful.

For the first time in the history of the planet, there is a wide spread consciousness that is anticipating what disaster might arise.  For all our flaws, those flaws also allow for this singular super power.  We can anticipate, plan, and even predict with fairly impressive accuracy.  There aren’t any animals that have 5, 10 and 20 year plans for their life, let alone the trajectory of well being for their entire species.  Animals might be able to make annual migrations, but compared to humans they are pretty much limited to living in the moment.  As much as we humans can cause ourselves misery by failing to really be present in the moment, it’s simply the cost for being able to experience a reality distortion that might actually come true, that is, thinking about a plausible future which we can bring about.

There are a fairly sizeable number of people who are incredibly anxious about our effects on the planet.  And while this is for good reason, it does risk missing the larger picture.  The fact that we have an idea about what we have done, what we are doing and what needs to change in order to correct course is simply an astonishing feat of nature.  And that’s exactly what we are: we are a product of nature.  Mother Nature, if we can anthropomorphize her for just a moment, has been rather cold, patient and endlessly persistent in her drive to create something on this planet that is more than what came before.  She has been absolutely cutthroat in the process.  She has been completely unafraid to kill off all of her children - to wipe the slate clean in order to start over, and she has done this a disturbing number of times.  Simply put, Mother Nature has executed untold trillions of living beings so that we, the human species can have this chance to wiggle our way out of our own bind.  Looking back on the geological record one might even wonder if this is the default litmus test, as though the challenge of potential extinction is the rhythmic test of all species in order to sift for something far smarter, capable and aware than anything that has come before.  The impending disaster that we’ve created isn’t so much a mistake on our part as it is an opportunity, to prove ourselves worthy of this planet’s future.

RIVALNYM: APATHY & EQUANIMITY

April 14th, 2021

If you are unfamiliar with rivalnyms, they are a particularly juicy class of words that exist between synonyms and antonyms. They often define the exact same thing but with completely opposite emotional valences. 

A simple example of a rivalnym pair is nervous and excited.  Both describe something about what’s happening with our nerves, but one is positive and one is negative.

Another rivalnym pair is Apathy and Equanimity.

If we think about these two words in terms of the behavior they inspire, they are identical.  An apathetic person does nothing.  Someone who is equanimous is also likely to be doing nothing, but the reasons underlying the inaction are, strangely, counter valenced.  The apathetic person does nothing because they either don’t care or don’t think any effort would do anything.  The equanimous person takes no action, not because they don’t care, but because there’s simply no discernible reason to take action.

And yet, one of these states is far more desirable than the other.  One in essence describes peace, which can be a hard idea to swallow in a world that could still improve by a great deal and which requires a lot of work in order to make that improvement actually happen.  Apathy, in the same context seems more like a state of being overwhelmed, as if things are so bad that nothing should be done because no improvement is possible.  

With this rivalnym pair we approach something eerily close to neutrality while still stretching to each extreme on a different spectrum.  It’s a good example of how our experience at any given time is really poorly captured by a single word, or even a few.  We are constantly traversing many spectrums that may even seem to actually be contradictory.

And yet, the core function of language is to reduce experience to these communicable units.  We scrape the universal from the unique in order to find a bridge to other people who can relate by having the same universal aspects present in their own unique experience.

As with progress in nearly every field, we reduce and then expand.  With language we reduce the universal to language that can be shared, and then we expand the language to encompass more experience.

AS GOOD AS THE WORD

April 13th, 2021

It’s a high compliment in any age to say that someone is as good as their word.  Language is the communal hallucination that allows us to distort reality in ways that are congruent across different perspectives, and because of this, it’s a useful distortion.  Realty doesn’t always bear the fruit of our words however, but time always proves whether we at least strive to live up to our own word or not.

If you think about language as a separate organism, they way you might think of a computer virus as separate from you computer but which invades your computer and appropriates it for a particular use, we have to admit that language has done quite a good job of infecting the human mind.  Words like ‘virus’ and ‘infect’ are negatively valanced of course, and don’t hint at a possible symbiotic relationship.  Language, whatever it might really, truly be classified as, is certainly one half of a symbiotic relationship.  We keep it alive by using it, and we keep using it because it’s useful.  Now that we’ve made the bond it’s quite a difficult feat to think of a human future somehow divorced from language.  Can you think of what tomorrow would be like without language?  The task is much like asking someone to imagine the sky without the color blue, or clouds, or stars or the darkness of night.  We are intertwined with language to a very very deep degree.

To be as good as your word is to have your language in line with your behavior.  Your word describes your future actions.  This is a rather extraordinary feat to behold.  It requires not just an accurate model of the future, but also of one’s self, and how that self might act in the future. And then of course the ability to communicate this to another person.  With all told, it’s a quite a miracle that we can coordinate to achieve such grand aims.  Other animals certainly communicate in collaborative ways but we humans seem to have discovered the secret sauce to super charge this ability into a quantum leap.  Just try to realistically think about any other species on the planet putting a space station in orbit with a few of it’s kind aboard.  The idea is laughable at best, and humbling when truly considered.

And our quantum leap is achieved purely on rails of language.  Other species may have a little information to pass on, like bees sharing locations, and other animals may have rhythm, beat, and melody, but only humans combine all these elements with a staggering amount of content, and we do it in many forms.  These words can be listened to or read.  They can be emailed, or printed, tweeted or texted.  A song from a whale or a bird can only be heard.  That’s it.  The song can’t be listened to again unless it’s remembered perfectly, and while this is possible, memory is never perfect.  Like genes, memory allows for mutations and shifts.  Language is similar.  Words shift through time, and some might argue a word never means the exact same thing twice.  But nonetheless, our ability to record language in such a variety of ways increases the fidelity of our communal memory.  Language is the first medium that allows us to encode the past and the likewise, potential futures.  No animal has ever had such a tool, and just look how effortlessly we take it for granted.  It’s little wonder that language itself sometimes loops back upon it’s hosts and causes some damage.  But still, we progress, and it’s likely that we will, with the tool of language, discover the form of it’s replacement, whatever that may be.

THOUGHT KNOT

April 12th, 2021

With all the thoughts we have on loop, we’re bound to make a knot.  And when thought and mentality and psychology is all knotted up, what is the solution?  More talking?  Talking, or language in general is often what gets us in the jam I the first place.  We’re universally convinced by our constant urge to talk that more talking will fix things, but what if talking about a problem simply makes it more of a reality?

Albert Einstein once said that “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  Now we might wonder, what is the most effective way to evolve a new form of thinking?  Do we evolve new forms of thinking by talking and rehashing?  Maybe, but the answer doesn’t seem clear cut either way.  We might wonder if there are other methods that are far more effective.

If anything creates new forms of thinking, it’s new experience, pure and simple.  Experience, as vague as the word is, wraps up all the senses.  Not just the ones that help out thoughts get all knotted up.  Experience is something done with the body that engages the spirit.  

Now an odd angle on this is whether talking about an old problem is such an experience?  Or rather, is talking about an old problem a new experience?  We might like to think so when we feel marginally better.  Again, it’s a matter of degree.  Why move the needle a single degree when there are other experiences out there that might swing the needle across tremendous swathes of change?

Perhaps we’re not so adventurous and many actually prefer the crawling progress of merely talking out one’s problems.  An practical example might be someone likening a 10 hour psychedelic trip to 10 years of talk therapy.  Many have certainly undergone experiences that would be phrased this way. 

But where is the middle ground.  The world of therapeutic psychedelics is still just beginning and there’s a tremendous amount to figure out. 

What is left to us in the real world to dive into in ways that might heal?  Where is the breakthrough that requires not a single word?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GLOW OF THE GAZE

April 11th, 2021

Everything was white.  The frozen and furious sky blurring past the horizon, down into the land.  Lucilius huddled closer to the meagre fire as it’s flames were whipped about by the snowy wind.  The sphere of heat was small but it was enough.  The fur of his animal skin clothing was frozen, melting and refreezing around the edges of his neck, his matted hair his own hood, his beard a solid scarf. 

The white grew grey with evening shadow.  The light of his small fire brightened, and he carefully, expertly fed it another piece of wood from his small scavenged pile.  Lucilius was a creature well-versed in the art of fire, knowing how to make the fire eat the new log slowly, knowing how the wind and this cold would temper and spread the heat he would squeeze out of the dancing light.  But his eyes grew too accustomed to the vibrant light, and with the gathering darkness he was blind to the shadow till it was too close.  

Lucilius sprung up, grabbing the long flint-tipped spear stuck in the snow, instantly levelling it forward toward the figure now near the fire.

The two were locked at a distance now from the fire.  Each held the other’s eyes, gauging the threat, the sense of violence ripening.  But neither bore teeth.  And slowly, each took a tentative, gentle step forward, toward the fire.  Lucilius raised his spear again as he got closer to the fire, getting closer also to this other person, this stranger.  They had no language, no names, no common music.  But they could agree as they sat, and then finally they could release their locked eyes in relief and instead look to the fire, concentrating on it’s warmth.

The dim memory of all this clouded Lucilius’ eyes as he dazed off into space.  But a cheer rose all around him and he snapped back to reality.  The luminous screen bathed the cheering crowd in a glow.  A point had just been scored in some game playing out far away from the bar where Lucilius now found himself.  Friends clapped high hands and pulled down fists in their aggressive joy.  Lucilius half smiled to himself, picking up a nacho piled with all kinds of glory and taste.  What extravagant living, he thought.  But some things, he realized simply never changed as he watched everyone turn back to the screen, all these eyes now huddled around it, relieved from that task of looking at each other.