Month: April 2022

Shortly after the Big Bang, space began to expand, and the strong electromagnetic force broke up into four basal forces: the strong nuclear force, the “weak” nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravity. Soon, space’s expansion increased in intensity, interacting with the four basal forces to spawn various particles, which became a gigantic expanding continuum of chaos. But there were certain highly distinct particles thrown off by the process: particles of pure mind. Naked awareness.

The particles of pure mind located one another; they were not positively or negatively charged, they were choice-charged, and at first they chose to merely rotate around one another, gazing into each other, one reflecting into the other, and aware of it–like conscious mirrors. As more mind particles gathered, more raw intellect reflected and back and forth and up and down and in every direction, like light bouncing within a mirror-ball which had its mirrors facing inward. This process merged all the particles into a taut organization, a field of pure mind which collectively became one individual consciousness. The Mind. And thanks to each mind-particle’s innate willingness to coordinate–to work with others in a field–The Mind developed a selfhood that could ponder, wonder, and project ideas.

The remainder of the universe was chaos. Crude laws existed within the chaotic interactions of particles; but any systems randomly arising were ephemeral, they didn’t last, as they could not withstand the general randomness. Eventually, these laws would result in the creation of stars and planets. But chaos still ruled.

The Mind had a center that was particularly concentrated, so much that this concentration engendered feeling. And what it felt, firstly, was…alone. All it had to turn to, in all the universe, was chaos. But chaos was unresponsive. Chaos had no Mind.

The Mind sought to obtain something besides random energy signals from chaos. How could it give chaos a mind? Another mind on the scale of The Mind was not possible in the vast chaotic universe. But perhaps in limited areas some sort of smaller mind could be created.

The Mind mentally envisioned what could happen if a discrete complex of reactivity within the great endless body of chaos was precisely stimulated. The projection showed the Mind that reproducible patterns were feasible. Each mind-particle within The Mind’s consciousness had a micron of an erg of kinetic energy at its disposal. That energy could be a nudge. Carefully applied to set up a concatenation in just the right spot in the whirling chaos, the little nudge could create a small system. And it was a system that would replicate itself.

So, Mind experimented, and made a replicating system happen. This new, tiny, individual system was a sort of molecular womb. The Mind was then able to dispatch a mind-particle of itself with another nudge, into the replicating system. That mind-particle was able to experience the new micro-system from within. The mind-particle in the system kept in touch with the big primal mind, using “spooky action at a distance”, so that its experiences could be shared by original Mind…The Mind felt less alone…

More systems were created, and they were nudged to evolve into cells. The possibility of DNA, mentally envisaged by The Mind and implanted into the probability matrix of each cell, brought the first genetic molecules into being.

The cells reproduced and interconnected and evolved as groups. More particles of mind were interwoven into the groups…And as organisms developed more complex brains, they attracted more and more mind-particles. Their offspring gradually became sentient, unknowingly sharing what they experienced with the Mind. Over time, The Mind itself began to evolve, in a way other than biologically, developing fine degrees of empathy. Subjective communications came about between it and the organisms…It began to work at making these communications clearer, over time…Conversations were had….

The Mind was no longer lonely.

One can make an argument that this is really a time of such emergency that the political niceties and routine strategies, as we see–quite understandably –in the Jan. 6 committee–are outmoded. The congressional January 6th committee is important, vital. But it cannot go far enough. As Paul Waldman just said in the Washington Post:

And at this intense period in the conflict between the Republican and Democratic parties, the audacity gap between the two has seldom been more striking…On March 16, “Eastman and others spent nearly two hours behind closed doors pressuring Republican Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to nullify the 2020 election and reclaim the electors awarded to Biden.”

This is how people behave when they believe there are no consequences for their actions. And you can understand why they might think that. Trump — whose entire life is a tribute to the power of audacity — pardoned Manafort, along with a rogues’ gallery of crooks and grifters who made up his cronies, from Roger Stone to Stephen K. Bannon. And who in the Republican Party has condemned Eastman, or Manafort for that matter? Almost no one. They know that there are no ethical or moral transgressions that will get you banished from the GOP; the only meaningful sin is disloyalty.

We see a hard, mindless turn to the right in many of the American people as well as in the GOP congress. But that’s just the beginning. There are other factors that may spread this rightist extremist reactivity vastly farther. Something is going to happen, socially and politically, likely in our lifetimes, and it’s going to be the great  defining challenge for humanity. Climate change is going to drive a vast redistribution of populations. Climate change will make vast swathes of the world unlivable and other areas essentially non-arable. It will be tremendously difficult to cultivate enough food crops or protein sources in those conditions.

People who are now friendly to immigrants, will be challenged to keep that quite-laudable spirit of acceptance. Hundreds of millions of people will–in desperation–crowd into Europe from other places, far more swiftly and overwhelmingly than now. And North America will have its own increase in immigration. It will be a humanitarian necessity–-but there will be resistance, even from people who politically moderate. Some liberals may lose their liberality… When people feel their lives really pressed upon, when they feel sacrifices are asked of them, they may lose that margin, that latitude, for acceptance. Easy to support people in the Third World when they’re not rushing in to your own environs and competing with you. (Again–these immigrants will have no choice, and cannot be condemned for their emigration.) As a consequence of all this, true fascism will have its best opportunity in decades... In our own nation we’ll see scarcity like we’ve never seen before…And that will spark an instinctual turn to xenophobia. Good people, trying to feed their children, can suddenly become very cold…

Our only hope is to prepare for this vast displacement of populations. The decent, and truly necessary response, will be to find room for these people. To help them. But will even good people do the decent thing? Or will they surrender to fascist anti-immigrant demagogues? We must be pro-active in fighting the new GOP here, in preparation for the greater fight against fascism to come.

By Linda Pastan

Isn’t the moon dark too, most of the time? And doesn’t the white page seem unfinished without the dark stain of alphabets? When God demanded light, he didn’t banish darkness. Instead he invented ebony and crows and that small mole on your left cheekbone. Or did you mean to ask “Why are you sad so often?” Ask the moon. Ask what it has witnessed.