John Shirley Blog

“And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.”
― James Agee

 Older people feel that time passes faster as they age. But time isn’t going faster for them–except subjectively. This unpleasant sense of being rushed through life can be relieved; we can adjust our perceptions so that time “passes slowly” for us again.

In normal day to day states we “come to” from time to time; we come out of the free-association daydreaming state–”Gosh, it’s three o’clock already!”–and time seems to have gone by very rapidly since the last time we emerged. As we get older, or generally sink into a state of inattentiveness, it’s as if you’ve taken a movie film and removed half the individual frames, and then glued it back together. Watch it that way, and that fragmented movie  passes too fast, and too choppily, because we’re missing key perceptual moments from it.  For various reasons–perhaps associations spawned by memories, or a tendency to withdraw attention to save energy– elderly people in particular tend to be caught up in a subjective state that makes time seem to rush along like a film missing half its frames.

But if we adjust our perceptivity we no longer feel dragged along, passing too rapidly through life.  This re-tuning of our perception of time–and of life itself–can be adjusted through certain forms of meditation. Basic Zen meditation, Vipassana meditation, Gurdjieff’s self-remembering methods,  or the mindfulness  methods of Jon Kabat-Zinn, allow us to exist more fully in the now, constantly returning to what is. Through certain meditative techniques we learn to actively return to the present moment, a process that takes us out of identification with the random churning of the ordinary mind. As we make contact with this wider perception, we’ll notice that time will seem to slow in an agreeable way.  It feels miraculous when it happens, but it’s simply the result of an adjustment of attention. And it doesn’t have to be done sitting in a meditation posture–it can be done while doing housework, or taking a walk. “Walking meditation” is common in Zen and in Tibetan Buddhism.

When I am engaging in a form of mindfulness meditation one second seems to take, perhaps, four seconds to play out, or even more, but in a pleasant way. I don’t feel like “time is dragging”.  Time itself, of course, moves at whatever rate it chooses. I’m simply perceiving more of it. The apparent slowdown happens because in the meditative state I’m not caught up in free-association or daydreams. As such times I’m not on the hamster wheel of the mind; I’m not in the usual ruminative state, which sucks up so much attention. Of course, daydreaming has its uses, and the mind’s ability to free-associate is vital–but the problem is its seductiveness. If we let it take us over entirely it becomes a way to be asleep while walking around only nominally awake.

In the meditative state I take in more information; the sounds around me are heard consciously, one after another, in a consistent stream; the sensation of my body is contemplated in an unbroken continuum with  smells, sights, the feeling of a breeze or just the air on my skin.  It’s all one holistic, unified impression. In this state of active consciousness there is a globular encompassing of everything I experience. When that state is achieved it does not allow for daydreams and mindless free association because there’s no room left for any of that. The mental space usually taken up by the vagaries of free-association is occupied by a total perception of the now. Your mind is fully active but only as a receptor for the present moment. And in that state, time “slows down” because I’m perceiving, cognitively taking in, more of the productions of time.

This process is a great relief. In it–whether for thirty seconds or thirty minutes or more–we are no longer caught up in the cycle of worries, fears, and anxious planning. At such times I’m freed up, and a feeling of refreshment flows over me. Equally important, after repeated meditative efforts, the brain gradually “resets” to take in more information, in a painless, objective way. And by degrees we learn to “slow time” so that life doesn’t pass us by.

The great fight right now in this country, in the Spring of 2021, has ramifications for every issue we hold dear; it applies to the fight against racism, it applies to the environment, it is critical to the support of science, to the work to stop the pandemic, and it applies hugely to the rights of the poor–it’s the struggle for democracy to survive the tsunami of Republican anti-democratic legislation that is sweeping the country. If we fail in that, everything else fails.

Read more at Common Dreams: The War on Democracy and Voting Rights Is Under Way: Witness the state legislatures: The Brennan Center for Justice has, as of Feb. 19, identified more than 250 bills that would roll back voting rights in 43 states.…

      The act of revealing, or disclosure—that’s what the word apocalypse used to mean. It meant revelation. It meant a rent in the veil; an opening up that revealed divine purpose.

      For most people now, apocalypse has come to mean widespread destruction, even an end of the world as we know it.      

      People tend to associate apocalypse with widespread death; with divine vengeance. We link it with the punishment of human misdeeds. We assume it would be a judgment on all of us.

      For all I know, an apocalypse of that kind might be in the cards. Whoever deals the cards in this big casino we call the universe–or whoever set the casino up in the first place–isn’t confiding in me.

      But I doubt a Judgment Day, per se, is coming. Consider the precedent.

      Spurious prophecies of world-ending apocalypse are as common as ragweed and thistles. They sprout in every culture; they put burrs under every saddle. Periodically, riders gallop about in terror, shouting a warning of coming apocalypse.

      Such dire warnings go back thousands of years. If the prophets of doom had been right, the entire human world would have ended in fire and ice thousands of times by now.       As you may’ve noticed, it didn’t happen. Large scale disasters—like the Black Plague–happened at times, yes; world-ending ones, no.

      Not a year passes without a charismatic pied piper luring his followers off some cliff to avoid an imaginary damnation. But the kind of apocalypse imagined by fanatic mis-interpreters of allegory and myth never quite comes about. Qanon is another variant, now.

      Of course, something apocalyptic, in the widespread-destruction sense of the term, could arise from sheer chance. We have been reminded of that, this last year, by a quite-dangerous pandemic. Then again: a sufficiently large asteroid with an Oedipal yen for Mother Earth; or perhaps a derangement of the inner works of the sun, leading to nova.

      But if  “the Four Horsemen” do come galloping in, chances are human beings will be spurring them on. The destruction of Native American societies seemed apocalyptic to tribal peoples. World War One was unprecedentedly destructive; World War Two felt like apocalypse for six million Jews in Europe; it was world-ending for Japanese civilians caught up in the fireballs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was the Vietnam war’s carpet bombing and napalming; there were the killing fields of Pol Pot, the purges ordered by Mao—all those events seemed apocalyptic to people enduring them. Americans have not forgotten the shattering Jihadist brutality of the 9/11 attack; to people in south Manhattan it felt like the end of the world, for a time.        

      Somewhere, you see, catastrophic apocalypse is always going on– in Syria, and the South Sudan; in Yemen. Apocalypse Now was the title of the Coppola film and now is always the operative word.

      We could recite an endless litany of human barbarism, human destructiveness. But good human beings died to end slavery in the Civil War. For every slavery advocate there was, somewhere, an abolitionist. Women for centuries were crushed under patriarchies but they fought back, and marched to get voting rights—and good men gave them equal rights. Men and women gave their lives to stop Hitler. A public consensus–a kind of shared consciousness–that the Vietnam war was a big, brutal mistake finally forced its end. Something similar happened with the Iraq war.

      Yes, the world sometimes seems to be run by the greedy, the short sighted and opportunistic, so that millions constantly run short of food and countless children die of dysentery. But there are also big, well funded organizations trying to feed those people, trying to provide clean water and medical help, and in many localities succeeding.

      Our ongoing catastrophic “apocalypse” seems perpetually mitigated, hemmed in by the cooperative efforts of good people. These are people who, mysteriously enough, actually care what happens to strangers. Why? Is it merely some mindless sociobiological urge? Sometimes the most innately kind people can be desperately selfish—and yet altruism never goes away completely.

      Given the selfishness we all tend to succumb to, why does organized sympathy ever catch on?

      Maybe there’s a spiritual X Factor, as the late Colin Wilson used to say. Could it be that there’s a magic that can enter the atmosphere of the world, that can crackle like static electricity; that ripples invisibly by like radio waves? Maybe that “magic” is sparked by words, but, like a flame needing oxygen, it requires a certain minimal degree of consciousness.

      We’ve seen that apocalypse originally meant revelation. A revelation is a revealing, a disclosure–an opening. It could be that the apocalypse that is about opening is the one that matters. Something comes along and shocks us–whether  vision, or a disaster–and it awakens us, if only for a  few moments; it makes us look around with fresh eyes. It has made us question what life is for. Does this existence have meaning–or is it all just a random alteration between suffering and satiety?

      Revelation: an unveiling–an opening. Why does a revelation ever happen? Isn’t it for the sake of understanding? What’s the point of it, if not understanding?  When we talk about understanding, said Jiddu Krishnamurti, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely–the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears. When you give your whole attention to it.

      If apocalypse is revelation and revelation is an unveiling, an opening, where do we find it in ourselves? And if we do find that revelatory consciousness, how can we share it with the world?

      Cameras used to have shutters—perhaps digital cameras have them too. Somehow any camera opens to light. When a shutter opens, a dark place within the camera is exposed to light and an image forms. A curtain of sorts is drawn back, a veil is opened—and the camera, without prejudice, can take its photo of whatever is there. 

      The methods of Vipassana Buddhism, of Zen teachers, of Krishnamurti, of G.I. Gurdjieff, of Black Elk, of Vedanta, of esoteric Christianity, of certain Sufi schools, all have something in common–the greatest spiritual teachers nudge us toward a deliberate movement of attention to the present moment; to the world around us, and to ourselves. They ask us to see and feel what is, without prejudice. They direct us to our inner camera, to find the shutter so we can open it and take that impression, that inner photo. In that moment, we can objectively take in the world around us. But this “inner camera” has two lenses; one pointing outward, one pointing inward. The two exposures somehow merge in one almost holographic realization.

      The inner lens is turned inward, in self-observation. Photographers need to develop skills—the pictures at first can be out of focus, marred by glare. But as we work on it, we get clearer and clearer images. 

      And that inner camera has another distinction from the mechanical kind: properly used, it registers feelings, sensations, scents, touch, as well as visual impressions. And eventually, we’re told, it takes all this in at once, merging this input into a master picture.

      Since our symbolic camera takes everything in, it can seem pitiless. It can as be shocking as an explosion. Increased consciousness brings people the bittersweet shock of seeing themselves as they are, for the first time. Even the finest people are likely to be shocked by aspects of their own personalities, by their own automatic reactions to things, that they see for the first time through rigorous use of the “inner camera” of self observation.

      An increase of consciousness that includes real self-observation can be an apocalyptic shock. One’s inner house of cards collapses; one’s flimsy framework of rationales for selfishness falls apart. It is said to feel like the world is ending.

      The person experiencing this inner apocalypse thinks, I had no idea I was so self absorbed, so childish, so automatic in my reactions, so without real volition.

      What, they wonder, is real inside them anymore? Is there a real self—something besides vanity, defensiveness, desire?

      But with the apocalyptic collapse of the false self, a new possibility arises. The light of consciousness doesn’t just reveal the false, the transitory—it also reveals the finer energies, the intelligence infused into the cosmos. Something higher is revealed and it helps in the building of new inner possibilities. A whole new range of choices open up; a new freedom from identification and blind suffering.

      Apocalypse, even in the Judgment Day sense, offers a light at the end of the tunnel. In the various myths of deluge, like Gilgamesh and the tale of Noah, something is saved and the world begun again. The Book of Revelation offers a kind of rebooting of the world, some cast into the lake of fire but the righteous offered a new, finer world.

      The inner apocalypse—the true apocalypse, to my way of thinking—offers its own path to “paradise”. It’s not the fanciful paradise of Heaven, but it is a release from the tyranny of suffering. It offers a gradual increase of freedom from the misery of identification, from blind anger and fear. Suffering is still part of life—but an authentic increase in consciousness changes our relationship to suffering. We’re no longer shivering, naked in the cold. We’ve built a new home; we have a fire; we have hope.

      But what does that do for the outer world? What about the external world’s endless apocalypse—or the chances of a final one?

      Catastrophe is always waiting in the wings. In 2010 there was an enormous explosion in the California town of San Bruno. A natural gas pipeline blew up, completely unexpectedly. Eight people were killed, 38 houses destroyed. It had been quiet and peaceful till that instant; no one had the faintest notion it was going to happen. Then, from one moment to the next, a localized apocalypse consumed a whole neighborhood.

      Last year the Texas town of West was blasted by a fertilizer factory explosion. Out of the blue, 15 people were killed, 150 structures destroyed.

      Those particular explosions could be traced to human error. But centuries ago the volcanic devastation from the eruption of Vesuvius seemed to ancient Romans to be the wrath of the god Vulcanus. Both kinds of localized apocalypse came about with shocking unexpectedness.

      It would be foolish to walk the world in fear—but destruction on a colossal scale is always possible. Madmen can build bombs; earthquakes can shake cities to rubble. If I were walking in San Francisco and saw an enormous fireball consume a whole block, I would be startled, horrified, concerned—but I wouldn’t be terrible surprised. Gas pipelines underlie the city. Magma underlies the continent.

      And my own physical apocalypse will inevitably come one day—this body, at least, will simply die. My father died when I was 11—he got an undiagnosed meningitis. There was no warning that his headache and fever were lethal— but in a few days, he was gone.

      Consider Auden’s  Musee des Beaux Arts: “About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: /how well they understood/Its human position: how it takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;/…In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster…”

      Cultures rise and fall; plagues sweep through. Wars devastate. The world in some region is always shattering—and we turn away, quite leisurely from the disaster. Sometimes we do it because we must, perhaps for the sake of family; other times we turn away out of fear, indifference, selfishness.

      Yet that mysterious X-factor, that intelligent potential, remains: a background hum of communal consciousness, the wellspring of actual conscience, seems to draw people together to try to end foolish wars, to feed the hungry, to send FEMA and the Red Cross to disaster areas. That variable signal, that lighthouse gleam in the fog, indicates that there’s something more in people—something that might be awakened to address the outer “apocalypse”, ironically because of the possibility of inner apocalypse. People who work toward consciousness seem to blossom with empathy, with concern for other people. The spiritual apocalypse, the inner revelation, works against the external apocalypse.

      Could a growth of consciousness, starting from within and spreading outward, change the world?

      Certainly there’s a chance, instead, that humanity could bring about its own mindless “judgment day” through environmental irresponsibility. Anthropogenic climate change will lead to mass displacement of some people; our ability to raise food may be compromised; the struggle for resources could spawn wars. The risk of nuclear war has receded somewhat—but it is still quite real.

      G.I. Gurdjieff spoke of “the terror of the situation”—of a world of people asleep when they supposed themselves awake; people armed with terrible weapons and equipped with too little conscience. He felt that walking, talking sleep, that absence of mindful consciousness, was the base cause of war, and could well lead to the premature end of humanity.

      But if we are more conscious of ourselves, undergoing that inner apocalypse,  we’ll be freer, more able to help in the world around us. And we’ll be more empowered to house those displaced refugees; to work together to raise and distribute more food; to find common ground so we can avert future wars.

      It’s a curious thing. We need an apocalypse of one kind—to avoid the other kind.                                                              

The Department of Meme Toxicology has issued a new report warning of AYN RAND POISONING. Causes of Ayn Rand poisoning include reading Ayn Rand’s novels & the rants of Austrian School of economics fanatics, & the rhetorical drippings of Ron Paul. Indications: hypertrophic selfishness, radical lack of empathy, indifference to poverty and human suffering, a willingness to elevate the law of Survival of the Fittest over all humanitarian concerns, an inability to perceive the consequences of environmental pollution, an extreme reaction to the presence of unions, blindness to social benefits of taxation, eg their own use of tax-supported programs. Prognosis, the death of civilization.

“No one may leave here,” said the Leader. “We must commune with the great Cosmic Eye. And after–”

“And after,” interrupted Smythe, who had catalyzed this rebellion against the Leader of the Sect of the Cosmic Eye, “there will be  more of the same. You will interpret the Eye’s signals in a way convenient to you–as ever!”

There was a murmur of agreement from the sect’s assemblage in the great hall they’d built in the forest. “Wait!” called Luella Fiske, known for her flares of inspiration. “Yes, our leader got lost in vanity and fell into darkness! Let us pray to the Eye and ask if the leader gives us light or darkness!”

Even as she said it the Eye at the Center of the Cosmos sent its reply: Though bright with noon light, in the next moment the room was plunged into unbroken darkness; an obscurity deeper than eclipse enwrapped them. The Leader yelped in fear,  ran gibbering out of the building, and was blinded by the sunshine when he passed out of the pool of black the Eye had imposed.

The others chose to stay in complete darkness, until the Eye should lift the shadow on its own. As the days and nights passed, their other senses became more acute, as if the darkness forced them to subtler feelings, an exquisite sensitivity that slowly allowed them to see again using a light conducted from within, so that the pool of darkness slowly dissolved, and they saw the world once more.

Then they went their own way, none of them ever needing a Leader to tell them about the great Eye again, since they each  looked on the world with the eye of the Eye.

Harry brought Norris a golden knife. Norris had been Harry’s fence for twelve years, and they were, if not friends exactly, something close to it.

Norris told him how his kids were doing and when his wife was getting out of the state pen for women and how to hide things from the IRS and how a person actually had to buy a house.

Harry had figured he’d get a good price for that stolen knife. He’d got it when he went into someone’s house with a carpet cleaning crew—which he did mostly so he could steal things. Yes, he figured he’d get a good price because Norris loved gold: he had gold watches, six gold rings, a gold pendant, two gold chains, a gold painted car.

Norris surprised him by offering him a low price for the knife. “That’s solid gold, man. Fine workmanship, solid gold. I checked it in an antiques register. Solid fourteen karat. Sharp and in mint condition. I want three times that.”

Norris refused, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the knife. So Harry, still surprised, shrugged and put the knife back in the gym bag and said, “I’m outta here,” and he was even more surprised when Norris jerked the bag away, took out the knife, and stabbed him in the chest with it.

Norris stood over him with tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry. I always liked you. I didn’t want to pay for that knife, though. It’s too good to pay for like that. It’s gold. It’s beautiful. But I had to have it. I wish you’d brought me ten silver spoons worth the same as you wanted. I would’ve bought them. But gold…and a knife perfect for killing, both. I could let the gold go, or the knife, but not both the gold and the knife.”

Harry whispered, “I understand, man. I do.”

Then he died, but he died understanding.

I mean, it made complete sense. Totally.

Voices

“Your parents are worried about you,” the child psychiatrist told Jeremy. “Do you know why?”

“Yes,” the boy said, “it’s because I hear voices.”

“What do the voices say?”

“They don’t say anything.”

“Then how can you be hearing voices, Jeremy? They just sort of hum, or bark? I’ve heard of that.”

“No, they’re not even voices. It’s only one, and it’s not exactly a voice.”

“Then what is it like?”

The boy leaned back in the leather chair. He looked at the cryptic doctoral certificates, framed, on the wall. He looked at a bowling trophy. “You like bowling?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think of a doctor bowling.”

“Well I do. It makes me feel like I’m just doing what my body likes, sometimes.”

“I know what you mean by that, I do.”

“The voice, or whatever it is, Jeremy. Can you try to tell me what it’s like?”

The boy looked at a world globe. “Well, um…I don’t know.”

“Try to describe it. Take your time.”

The boy considered; the miniature grandfather clock ticked. A hummingbird came to the window and seemed puzzled by a reflection in it. It hung beating the air, looking at the glass, fooled and not fooled, then went away. “Huh,” the boy said.

The psychiatrist waited. At last the boy said, “It’s like…if you’re in a dark cold room, and somebody pulled back a curtain, just a little, high up on the wall, so that one ray of light came down and you put out your hand and in the dark cold room you could feel that warm light on your hand, and how that feels.”

“That sounds like a pleasant feeling. A good one.”

“It is. It is a good feeling. But it’s just…It’s like the feeling is talking. It’s saying, ‘Ray of Light, Ray of Light, Ray of Light.’ It’s saying ‘You and Me, You and Me.’ It’s saying ‘Open and feel Me.’ But it’s not saying anything either. It’s not saying anything at all. No words. It doesn’t talk in words.”

The psychiatrist realized his heart was thudding loudly in his chest. “When…when do you hear…feel this?”

“When…when things are a certain way in me. I don’t know how to say…”

“Is it when…just like receiving? A feeling of nothing but receiving? Very…very empty except for…for receiving?”

“Yes! Yes, that’s it.”

The psychiatrist looked at the clock. “We have some time left. Do you want to play Chinese Checkers?”

“Sure.”

The psychiatrist told Jeremy’s parents there was nothing wrong with him. But he asked permission to speak to the boy on his birthday every year, “just to keep an eye on things,” but what he didn’t say was: he asked to do this for himself, and not for the boy…

Sadly, what happened on January 6th, 2020–gibbering louts, gullible Qanon stooges and white supremacists invading the Capitol Bldg–is probably only a prelude. White nationalists and their conspiracy-theorizing allies will not go away; probably not for a generation. These people are deeply entrenched in their fantasy world. They have guns (who doesn’t?) and while tottering about in their psychological VR, they can twitchily squeeze the triggers of real firearms that will have an effect in the real world. They can make pipe bombs; they can drive explosive-laden trucks into buildings. They can emulate Timothy McVeigh and other mass murderers.

The New American Civil War may be fought on relatively small, discrete battlefields scattered about the US Capitol and state capitols. Unless a faction of the American military splits off under some “General Jack D. Ripper”, a lunatic officer with fanatic followers in the ranks, there won’t be much army-vs-army, per se, in this civil war. But blood will flow. There will be white-nationalist militia attacks; there will bombings, and massacres carried out by extremist right-wing murderers. Viet Cong style operations may arise in some places–but instead of VC it’ll be American racists, misled veterans, and Qanon “believers” who will discover to their dismay that combat is not like a video game. They will all be defeated. But in the meantime there will be horror; pulses of severe social chaos.

Experiments in secession are not unlikely. I predict attempts by right-wing extremists and white nationalists to declare “truth zones” (actually, Lie Zones); towns, even counties, where their racist conspiracy-theory memes and “sovereign citizen” falsehoods are for a time imposed in local laws, and schooling. “We declare Trumptown to be a free state…” These localized secessions will not stand. All such endeavors will crumble. But some urban–and suburban–warfare may be necessary to rescue sane people from armed and violent buffoons. Even now, “Five Oregon counties will ask voters in the next election whether they want to detach from the deep-blue state and join neighboring red-state Idaho.”

This spotty Civil War, an outbreak of shingles on the body politic, will be vectored by the Big Lie, fed by the fever swamps of the internet, especially the lie that “Trump was elected”…But in the antebellum South, the original American civil war was itself fueled by lies: “Slavery is natural, Negroes are inferior, the Yankees are enslaving us and they’ll steal our land.” Today, neo-racist lies in the wilderness of the internet spread like the media version of zoonotic diseases.

A cultural pandemic...We can vaccinate people, especially children, against that cultural pandemic, starting now, if we systematically teach critical thinking; if we vigorously espouse a return to standard, reputable news sources, and valid resources of historicity. . .

Q. Why do we have to age and pass away?

A. Because nature is constantly rolling the genetic dice. There has to be room to roll the dice. There must be room for the outcome to play out. If we had no aging, but just  sudden death to clear space, it would be a constant mess.The process must be graduated to conserve resources and for reasons of species capability of processing death. Aging has sociobiological value; it helps us psychologically, and of course many elderly people have valuable wisdom, and are able to help care for grandchildren which enhances social stability. Social stability makes the species more likely to survive to reproduce…so that nature can throw keep rolling the genetic dice.

Q. Why does nature roll the genetic dice?

A. Some would say the arising of the constant rolling of the DNA dice is just a roll of the dice itself; just an accident. It seems unlikely some creator god came up with it. But that doesn’t mean there’s no agenda behind it.

Q. Whose agenda? Is it nature’s agenda? What is that agenda?

A. Can an accident have an agenda? Why not? What if that particular process of randomization, which we are unable to distinguish from an accident, was itself programmed in some sense. Even if nature arises by accident, it may have some self-awareness. It’s not inconceivable that this putative self-awareness immanent in nature chooses, over time, to very gradually guide the genetic agenda. Its agenda, at least one part of it, seems to be ongoing biological evolution itself.

Q. But what is biological evolution’s agenda? Where is it going? Isn’t it totally random?

A. If biological evolution has, or is part of an agenda, it may be something we cannot comprehend from here…The general consensus among scientists seems to be that evolution is entirely random. It is notable however that for the million-plus years humanity, in several forms, has been evolving, there is some form of recognizable progress. Though we remain animalistic in many ways, we are far more intelligent and capable than earlier stages of evolution.

Some would say that is suspicious. I myself think it is.  However, that progress is of relatively short duration; is within a fairly narrow span of evolutionary development, in comparison to the billions of years before it…

People worry about how long the human race will last, whether we’ll eradicate ourselves, or be destroyed by an asteroid. It’s theorized that most civilized races (or quasi civilized, as in our case) don’t survive the point where they lose control of their technology; where they fail to control weaponry, or fail to deal with self destructive environmental tendencies. We may survive, or we may not. But thinking that the point of existence, our justification as a species, is somewhere off in the future, might well be surrender to illusion; it might be captivation by a mirage.

It’s more likely that we exist so that *something* can experience what we experience, through us: our ancient ancestors hunting, mating, engaging in simple ecstatic dances; moments of triumph and despair; our art, our music, our moments of intimacy and companionship. The thing that created us so that it would not be alone…the thing that looks into its own eyes when we gaze into one another’s eyes…

It is satisfied, whatever we do. It’s simply here, through us, for the adventure; for the self discovery. It is the universe discovering itself from within.