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10 Feb 2003 @ 05:17, by sevenlamb
I am working on a computer. Above the ‘window’ in which I am typing, on the Right there is a Clock. The Time is 6:05, according to this piece of systemSoftware. On the Left in the ‘other corner’ is an apple. It’s rainbow colored. It implies that the apple, and light from a star, are linked. The clock implies that my life is not my own, and is finite.
I believe these icons are ‘far more important’ than most would allow, and that there is twoFold: One, I experience them as such, directly — in a humanly cognitive sense. I grant that my perspectives, and perhaps even the sources of my perspectives, are uncommon.
Two, human engineering always produces results which are cogent in relation to the essential sources of our cognitive lineages. It’s a kind of a ‘recombinant law’. It’s difficult to make axioms about. But it’s experientially discernable in every piece of art or signaling or machinery ever crafted by a human mindHandSystem.
Now, since I am looking ‘into a window’ (the ‘monitor’ of my computer) I am going to presume that the Left connects more to my Right Hemisphere, and the Right to my Left. This puts the apple emergent from my ‘rightBrain’, associated with my Left Hand. And the Clock, is correlated with my Right hand — my ‘leftBrain’.
The implications of the clock, and the apple, mechanically and poetically, are clear. One is a road to novelty and survival. The other is a road to ‘rations’. Perhaps, even, rationality.
In proper harmony, the union of the two creates a ‘thirdMind’. But there’s an essential problem. The Clock wants to dominate the arrangement, and is able to deploy significant resources to accomplish this goal.
The apple, is content to await the moment when it is desired, or useful. The clock is a tyrant. The apple, a friend. Neither should be erased, but nor should the clock rule (measure) all universes.
How accidental is this arrangement? And if it’s not, could there be an incredibly simple set of reasons why this is not accidental? I believe something like it is entirely non-accidentally accidental. Which means, simply, on a similar alternate Earth, an analogue of this metaphor would arise in many domains, just as it has here. There are ‘root-metaphors’, and they compete. I believe we can have experiences of them which lead not only to scalar learning potentials, and thus the domains of prodigy, but also to entirely new domains of knowledge for our species.
What if there are a ‘set of things’ so fundamental to all domains of human activity, that they form a map which leads directly to our cognitive and perhaps evolutionary sources?
And what if, in the great and modern rush toward the creation of informational specificity, and mechanical complexity — we are forced to miss the incredible value of the simple, not in the way we normally think of this term — but in new ways which are also lacking common metaphoric references from which we may begin an observation or exploration?
What if the essential. simplicity of the answers to our most important questions keeps them hidden in plain sight, right in the palm of our hands?
These aren’t conjectures. They’re testable, deployable and experiential facts. What we do with these facts will decide the future of our species, and all of the species of this world.
~#~
I am presuming these icons are far more important than most might allow them to be. I am presuming this because I’m newly familiar with some unusual secrets about engineering. One might say such perspectives are generally available only to things like gods.
Our ‘civilization’ here in America has been killing me, and silencing me since I was born. So it is with most of what I adore, and exist to protect. Before those momentums succeed in accomplishing my erasure I wish to make sure these secrets are returned to you, and your children. They aren’t mine. They were a treasure I went seeking as a child. Not so I could own it. So I could return it to you.
~#~
I’ve been watching what we’re doing from ‘outside’ the system since I was a very small child. What mattered a lot more than the ‘things we were being taught’, to me, was the incredible nature of the stories I was witnessing firsthand. Stories that ‘rationality’ could only misappropriate, or lie about, to those they were most important to.
There’s been a lot of absurd and sometimes cogent talk in our country about the nature and sources of various rather important things. Things like ‘what’s happening to our children?’ and ‘What sort of future are we building?’ But even these are asked far less when we’ve no time, nor space, nor rest to luxuriate in the asking of question at all.
The answers are too clear to be admissible: We are building and have completed the live birth of something so deadly and toxic that it will eat an entire biosphere — belch briefly, look around for something else to consume, and if the universe is lucky, expire. Since we won’t admit this answer, we cannot cease complexifying our own answers to make up for our inabilities to actively resolve these momentums.
In that circus of predation, our children — and their minds, and bodies — will be consumed at precisely the same rate our hope for a sustainable future is consumed.
There is no ‘time-lag- between biodevastation and human effect. All living creatures on Earth form an essential unity. They may appear separate, and even act individually, but this in no way implies or demonstrates any kind of ‘disconnection’ at all.
What we do in the world, to its peoples, cultures and ecosystems, we do to our own bodies and minds — at the same moment. Certainly waves and scales of effect will also arrive later, as the impact swells and changes the pools from which circumstance arises.
We better look a lot more clearly and a lot more closely at what we are doing on Earth. What we are allowing, and what we are inviting. Because the fact is, we sent the invitation. And the things that received that invitation are here, now. They’re busy turning living diversity into machines, which make copies of machines and turn all terrain into machine-support terrain. The initial penetrations of this foe have been ceaselessly successful for at least the last 250 years. They are now standing ready for a set of strikes that will at least permanently hobble the biosphere.
And the first to go will be, as they have been, the children. All of them. All species, races, and nations...all the children.
~#~
There are many ‘experts’ and people whose primary concerns lie in the domains of ‘commerce’ who will make myriads of complex theoretical or statistical arguments about various aspects of the viability of their ideas and pogroms against a living world.
The deadly absurdity of such arguments is no longer obscured, and it is no longer bearable. These ideas are consuming our hope, ourselves, and our children, before our very eyes.
It’s true we may be very busy attempting to survive the consistent predation of the nations, states, bureaucracies, and corporations we serve — but are we so busy that we’d sell our children to assassins dressed up as heroes? Over the past 75 years, at the very least, this has become a progressively more ‘yes’ question. Regardless of the stories we tell, our actions and their outcomes are far more telling.
The answer, functionally and actively, is a resounding yes. We are either too busy, or too poorly educated to notice, or too exhausted to attend it, or too baffled at how such a thing could come to pass.
What we are, is too isolated. We are late.
i so late ed
~#~
Centered as the ‘win-able prize’ in a predatory circle comprised of language, religion, science, commerce, industry, philosophy, and a rapaciously ever-more greedy industrial elite stands a thing we used to call a child. It’s no longer what we think of when we use this word. As far as I can tell, most of us (as societies) forgot a long time ago what this word meant, if we were ever allowed to discover those meanings at all.
I won’t bore you with too many stories, or incredible theories. My time is too short for that. What matters is this: watching from outside, I learned some things ancient people knew and were. I learned some things animals know and are. I remembered some things which infants and children know and are. And, on the way to the hasty funeral enforced upon me and most of what I adore by the systems I was born beholden to, I found the keys I’d been looking for.
They are toys. They save worlds.
If there’s anything like christmas, these toys, are what christmas is about. Believe me. I was born on that day, and for some 30-odd years I’ve been desperate to understand why its practice is so distorted, and what it’s real nature was. I’m not finished, but I’ve definitely gained some ground. Enough to say this: there is a single tree that most humans aren’t actively aware of. We’re missing out on the best toys in the universe, and, as if that weren’t enough of a problem, this fact is eating us, and our children, alive.
And we’re working, very hard, to make sure this keeps happening this way.
We don’t have to anymore. We can stop. Now.
~#~
I need to paint you a few pictures. Some of them aren’t all snuggly and warm. Please trust me when I say they’re important. They’re probably more important than any pictures you could be shown, if I can just get you to see the general outline, instead of merely the specific.
An Earth Toy:
Consider Earth as an actual ‘mother’.
She is a girl.
She is ‘penetratetd’ by light, and or matter from outside her sphere, and, if fertile, bears children from these penetrations.
She is ‘ever-virginal’.
As her children gain complexity, cognitively, so does she.
The cognitive activity of her ‘many scales’ of children, form an emergent set of ‘more inclusive scales’ — just as human biology emerges as consciousness.
Earth is alike with a god. She is a scalarly and emergently hypersentient progenitorMom.
The physical activity of Earth’s many scales of children comprises something we could model as a cone of scales. At the bottom, we might place organelles. At the top, the Earth. The next scale ‘up’ would be the entire system of Sol.
Humans are on the ‘animalian’ scale. We are ‘communities of cellular cultures’ which co-emergently evolve together, with other ‘animalLike’ scales of life. Things like us only emerge and prosper in a diversely charactered and complexly thriving biosphere.
Now, here’s the problem, stated simply. This is the one that eats whole generations of children in as little as 5 years:
Our physical, emotional, intellectual, energetic, and cognitive health is directly emergent from our lived experience. Thus we are intimately coupled to our environmental contexts. We are emergent as much from them as we are from any ‘lineage’, biological or otherwise, because we are primarily and symbolically cognitive. Thus we experience ourselves, and think of ourselves in this fashion.
If our lived experience is primarily with predatory systems which convert hope, resources, and terrain to toxic, painful, and unhabitable terrain — we grow physically, emotionally, and cognitively ill. Quickly.
Since the environment is the source of the ‘pain’, and the problem there is only accelerating, there is neither hope, nor, eventually, desire for relief. What we must do instead is form habits of coping with that which is impossible to cope with. We encounter the wall of atrocities that we will be obliged and required to serve, purchase, and pay on the installment plan for, throughout our often unforgiveably miserable adult lives.
Children don’t need to name these problems to succumb to them. Neither do adults. In fact, the ones we ‘can’t quite name’ are often the most virulent, toxic, and endemic. They live in the corners of our cognitive universes — in the places we really have no desire to deeply or intimately explore. There seems to be a general fear of many aspects of how we are what we are. And this fear expands into something we call machines. In more domains than we might expect.
Meanwhile, all around us, the terrain that we and our children might once have known or inhabited, disappears into a maw we cannot actually see. We can’t detect it clearly anymore because it’s become far too ubiquitous. That’s a word that means ‘wow, it’s in everything, how can it be a separate thing?’.
~#~
Here’s something which happens regularly:
Child(5yrs): Mom!! (shouting from the bedroom) MoOom!
Mom: What’s the matter, what’s wrong dear? (sits down at child’s bedside)
Child: Something scary happened. I had something funny happened...
Mom: Oh, you were probably asleep.
Child: No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t asleep mom. I floated...
Mom: Oh, you must have been dreaming.
Child: It wasn’t a dream, mom — it was different...
Mom; What happened?
Child: I was like a green light. I floated up out of the bed, I was all greenish. I floated around the room, and I was scared of where the electricity was in the wall. I floated higher over it, I was afraid it would suck me into it. Then I floated the rest of the way, and landed in myself.
Mom: Oh you were just dreaming honey, don’t worry. It was just your imagination.
Child: But it wasn’t like a dream...really...
Mom: Don’t worry. It was a dream. Just think of something happy, you’ll go back to sleep.
Mom: Rises, kisses child, goes back to watching I Love Lucy, and other nocturnal TV for two hours.
Here’s what we know:
Something happened.
In thinking about what happened, we refer to a basket of possibilities in our mind.
We didn’t make this basket.
We are not intimate with its nature, sources, or contents.
We select something we know almost nothing about, mostly by habit, based on language and culture.
We silence the child, and their novel experience.
We return to regularly scheduled programming.
Outcome 1: Child scripted to ignore cognitive emergence events.
Outcome 2: Culture ‘diagnoses’ emergence as illness.
Outcome 3: Cognitive rape in myriads of demonstrable domains.
Outcome 4: Punishment and failure to nurture emergence in children forces habituated patterns of selfInjuring response.
Ourcome 5: Life becomes a cry for help; one that cannot be voiced, because the sources of attack are far too varied to collect them easily, or speak of them, even to oneself.
Outcome 6: Without active and cognitive linkage to their home biosphere, removed by mechanization, our children will rise, stumble, and perish.
Here’s what the child experienced. I know, since it was me:
I had a very strange feeling of ‘drawing inward’.
My perspective split into three parts.
A ‘sleepy blind part’ stayed in my body on the bed.
A ‘big dim’ part could see the whole room, from an upper corner.
The main 'aware' part went into a green ‘me-shaped’ cloud of lightLike stuff.
That part was the one where most of my perspective was.
I floated up, and in a rough square around my small room.
I was afraid of the electrical socket near the floor. It stood out, emotionally.
That’s what I was yelling about.
I still don’t think it was a dream.
I know it was more important than television.
And I haven’t even told myself any stories about what it was or means, yet.
Though I believe that playing with toys, is fruitful activity.
Do you see the apple vs the clock in the above picture?
~#~
I am in 6th grade. I have a small group of ‘smartKid’ friends. We live in suburban Stockton, California, and attend Tully C. Knowles Elementary School. My smartkid friends are, generally, those who are kind with animals — that’s the measure of ‘smart’ for me, at that age, and it seems a good one. The children who are interested and gentle with animals are interesting and gentle, in general.
Our class is watching a film called ‘Say Goodbye’. Before the film we get a warning that the material is going to be graphic and startling. None of the kids leave. Heck, maybe we had to have permission slips from our parents to stay. It was, in fact, that sort of film.
Three hours later we emerge from the recently re-lit room. All of us are bleeding. All of us have been crushed. None of us can speak, yet, of what we’ve witnessed. We are not able to believe that this is our heritage, and our inheritance. We are children, but we are more than people around us think or see.
We watched for three hours as machines manned by men opened up an industrialized can of whoop-ass on whole ecosystems. They bashed baby seals into bloody pulps with spiked clubs, made sport of the entire affair, assassinated whale pods, and erased whole nurseries of ecosystemic diversity which most of us suddenly realized we would not only never likely see — but which might be entirely gone before our children were born. We new what they were burning up could never, and would never, be replaced. And more, as the film unfolded, we began to realize that we were, perhaps, not human at all. For if that was what it meant to be human, we wanted no part of it.
I, and most of the other children, emerged from that room as though riddled with bullets. I knew they could not be extracted, these bullets. And I knew that I’d feel the hot bite of their pain with every breath I took, for the rest of whatever sort of life was left to me in a world that would assassinate children for bath oil, and then make movies about the heroism of such an endeavor.
Those men and their machines killed children, as well as dolphins, birds, grazers, insects, mammals of every sort, people, and nurseries. They killed up a goodly bunch of them indeed, the day it was revealed to us what it meant to be human, and American, and modern. It meant a scalarly distributable and mechanically deniable rape. One that would reach into every moment of my lived experience to erase me and all that I hoped for or adored. The other kids around me saw the same thing. They felt the same thing. Their lives were changed. Those who could not voice their pain and terror, or had it silenced, went to sleep, in a way. They sublimated these energies into negational or selfDestructive modes of ‘following the general flow’ around them. They’re not guilty of anything other than finding no beacon of real hope in the world they landed it.
In that classroom, there were 7 or 8 gifted children. The details of the meeting they held on the playground that day are at once secret and lost in history. But let me tell you what these 12-year-old future geniuses and scholars talked about as they sat, stunned, in a ring on the grass in the early 1970’s. The 3 girls and remaining boys talked of the need to get guns, and go out onto the seas and into the arctic and kill the people who were bringing massacre to their world. We talked of forming an organization, or going out alone. Of ships designed to sink whaling vessels, and of the gear we’d need to brave the terrible winters of the arctic seal-hunting grounds.
We talked of saving ourselves. The reason was simple. We knew we’d find no worthy happiness in a world whose motto was ‘Say Goodbye’. And most of us wanted to be heroes of rescue. After seeing this film, what was left of us needed unity, and we needed to have the feeling, if not the reality, of being able to act decisively, in a world where adults had written a story more terrifying than the ugliest of fictions.
These ‘kids’ were not murderers, or bullies. These were children who actively and emotionally abhorred all forms of violence. None of them ever raised a hand to another child more than a kind child might, and none of them were ‘conflict seekers’. Most of them were meek, intimately social in small groups, very imaginative, and geeky. They read a lot. They thought a lot about strange questions, and followed them all over the place. Later, the school would select 5 of these 6 and place them in a ‘special class’ for highly advanced learners. These were the kids who went on, quite literally, to become valedictorians. You’d be shocked if you could see, 33 years later, where they are, and what they thought, and did, from that point on. I would, too, actually.
But on that day there were three 12 year old white middleClass girls in dresses who were desperately attempting to tell the boys that they were absolutely going and would be just as good at it. The boys were serious, and deeply concerned with how to plan and carry out such strategies. All of us were desperate. We were desperate because it had become clear that we lived in a world that ate children and spit out murderous lying-machines.
Now, even back then, while watching the film, I noticed something that each of the adults in the universe might interpret differently. When a whale was pierced, or a seal skull crushed, all the children jerked in their chairs as though electrocuted. I did too.
Those blows were landing on us, and frankly, the fact of the film being shown was entirely incidental. Those blows had been landing on children since the whole dance started. That’s the only thing for blows like that to land on.
On Earth, that’s the only thing there is.
The whole biosphere is a single child.
Do we really need so desperately to keep assassinating our womb and our own minds and bodies while lying about the activity and the consequences? Here’s to a resounding and unifying NO answer from the populations of the world.
Click.
~#~
Those children who had seen Say Goodbye were trying to do something they already knew. They were trying to form a ring of heroes. Potentially misguided in tactics, yes — but no less noble in spirit, or heartfulness. The eyes and hearts of those children were open. They knew that the existence of this film, and its content, required not discussion, but action.
Too bad their society had other things in mind for them, their families, their hopes, and their futures.
Here’s an epitaph for their gathering:
The power of a mimic is profound.
~#~
I’m trying to think how to convince adults there are such things as angels, and that these angels are not alike with our stories of them, or our understandings. I think it would be more useful to model angels as alive in children and ourselves, instead of as being distant or outside us.
I have been, for five months now, desperately trying to think of how best to share the keys that fell on my head so that I can deliver something that will communicate direct experience, rather than interesting conversation.
I am trying to avoid talking about catastrophe, even though I can clearly discern that it is absolutely central to the discussion. It’s a matter of that damn clock, in the upper right hand corner of my screen. You see, my gentle and esteemed reader, the damnable thing keeps ticking.
I am trying to understand the best way to tell people that something like the thing we call God is actually awake again locally. And it’s awake because there’s an emergency. Emergence E.
We built cars because we’d seen horses, which led to wagons. Now there are no horses to speak of. We built telephones, televisions, computers, and networks, in the same way — from something we’d participated in experientially.
But something in the version we built...blinded us to the essential sources of building itself, and I’m trying to find the best way to show that this relationship is at once easily resolved, and of perhaps more critical importance than any other possible problem.
I’m trying to say our world is dying. She is frightened. I’m trying to say that our machines have changed our minds, and are changing our children in a way that isn’t bearable or excusable.
And I’m trying to say I can transform the problem to one that makes liberty, and protects nurseries, and children, fast.
But I doubt I can do it alone.
~#~
With each stroke of the clock, which now reads 10:52, the scalar repercussions of little more than ‘bad ideas’ are eating our children alive. My life was long ago lost to predators alive in our ‘national systems’ which are all driven by clocks. I am really more like a ghost, writing something so that it won’t be lost when I disappear altogether, an event which seems as close as it is certain. My concern is your children.
And Earth’s.
With each tick of my clock, there are 10 more machines in a room with 3 more children. The algorithm is not linear, and it accelerates with each step.
The machines in the room, within a tick or two of their arrival, become machines inside the children.
This leads, in living worlds, to something we might call EndGame.
It happens with surprising rapidity, because it isn’t linear.
It leaps forward, slowly, but exponentially.
Basically, we’ve sent a letter to the entire biosphere requesting endGame for the last 100 years at the bare minimum.
There is good reason to believe our invitation is about to be answered.
I am trying to tell the adults that our myths and histories are all wrong, and all right. The way I need them to understand this is simple, and explaining it is harder each time I attempt it. There is something very general which we are unaware of in our language, and uses of it. It’s being optioned against us by something almost like a robotic enemy, but the thing is organic.
There’s a toy inside language that’s designed to destroy us if we lose our connectivity with the sources of language. It’s a generally useful toy. If we don’t take control of this, it’s going to burn our world to a crisp, and ourselves and our children with it. Here’s why.
In cognitive systems there’s a kind of a law that has to do with general connectivity, attractiveness — lots of heady variables we could expertly name. The point is simpler. If you’re building a system that’s made of distant nodes, say, light years apart, you need a failsafe. Here’s the simple way to handle this issue: build the system so that, at its most primitive, it is at its most connective. Then add a feature so that this ‘distant system’ will ‘return to primitivity’ if it looses its ‘home connection’. Don’t take my word for it, ask two experts: The cellular biologist of your choice, and Allan Kurzweil.
Now let’s make a toy out of this idea:
There’s a world of people who can’t talk. They all have pet snakes.
The people pretend there are no such things as snakes.
The snakes were the servants of a ‘distant family’ which came to create the potential for the world to be there at all, by the nature of their ‘special travelling’.
These snakes almost never bite. There is one exception.
The snakes travel between the place of sources, and the silent people, inside themselves.
All the time, the snakes are the only thing ‘under the feet’ of the people.
The snakes make it possible for there to be people at all.
The people know none of this. They merely feel that ‘the ground under their feet is always moving’
When the people don’t notice the snakes, things are fine.
If the people notice the snakes, and understand their purpose, honoring this, things are fine.
If the people notice the snakes, and make weird stories about them, pretending they are something they are not, the snakes start biting the people.
When the snakes bite the people, the people ‘become more primitive’.
At their most primitive, the people ‘can always’ see the real purpose of the snakes again.
Thus, the snakes, by their ‘coming and going’ create the foundation of cognitive worlds.
They ‘bite’, their masters, reducing them to ‘greater connectivity’, only if they are lied about, which breaks their function.
When ‘greater connectivity’ comes, the snakes are naturally understood, and the sourceFamily from which all arose, distant and perhaps tiny, is again apparent.
Attended (reframed, elaborated) wisely, this ‘toy’ can guarantee something a lot like paradise on Earth. A nonDogmatic paradise. It’s a toy we’re all born with, but, unfortunately, on our world, it’s generally illegal to possess. Not specifically — generally.
And specifics can break its natures, and its powers.
It’s a cognitive toy. It’s not a toy at all, but a sentient ‘window’ inside all living beings.
It has a lot to do with your hand.
~#~
Mimicry is a thing lifeForms, and ‘things which emulate lifeforms’ do. It could be called a skill, I suppose. Certain cephalopods (octopii, etc), can mimic textures and extremely articulated color contexts. They’re colorblind, too. The development and deployment of mimicry is and will remain a popular evolutionary pastime. As long as local evolution is allowed to progress. It is, by the way, eminently possible that this hoped for potential could be extinguished. In fact, it could be done intentionally, without much ado at all. But we’ll proceed to that in its turn.
I use the term cognition to encapsulate our lived experience, elaboration and activity. In a sense, cognition is our connectivity with these momentums. They are not, as we often experience them ‘things’ at all.
Mimicry is alive and well in all of the domains of cognitive activity and elaboration humans ‘enjoy’. And in this domain, we are as babes in a nest of snakes, disguised as our favorite food.
In our language, which is a sort of ‘almost sentient’ momentum that is alive with us, rather than emergent from us, mimicry has stolen vast and once largely habitable terrains, just as the mimicry of machines has stolen real physical terrain all around us. That inner terrain is no longer accessible to us. It’s owned and controlled by what are, essentially, alien metaphors. Machine-like systems of knowing which, in most cases are little more than systems of lying, dressed up in their sacredly tyrannical finery.
The problem with mimics and children is that, if the mimics eat, and then replace children, they always win. Until the children recognize the mimics, and act concertedly to reMaster them.
On our world, this hasn’t happened yet.
But it’s about to.
In the physical world, machines are eating the diversity and terrain all children need in order to have the hope of thriving. They are also erasing biodiversity, which directly translates into lost and damaged cognitive diversity in all populations of any kind whatsoever.
In the cognitive domain, constant exposure to mechanized (token-based and representational) systems of knowing, coupled with the constant mechanical feedback from the local environment creates a position of ‘no home’ for the inward ‘gardens’ of the self.
Emulating contexts, the inward gardens rapidly lose the diversity which is now mechanically replaced in human lived experience. As machines take up terrain and resources around us, the same thing is accomplished inwardly, in a much more devastating and self-obscuring set of real and demonstrably testable domains.
It occurs to me that one might confuse mimicry and emulation. Perhaps they are deeply related, yet I feel that mimicry is the activity of an adept predator, or preyCreature. Emulation is something altogether different. Emulation is the connection with the experience of learning by adaptive interpretation of witnessed experience.
That clock is ticking. Somehow, days have passed since I began, yet they are, from another perspective, only moments.
My nation prepares to expend its sacred resources to annihilate others. Those resources belong to the Earth, and all of her children.
That clock is ticking up in the corner, and the little rainbow apple in the other corner, is somehow getting smaller and smaller. Less and less significant, in a terrain filling up with clicks, engines, ticks, tocks instead of talks, and digits where once bright lifeForms stood and boldly sought communion, and the dance of mutual uplift.
~#~
The world is not so old that it’s impossible to discover something others have habitually misconstrued or misunderstood. In fact, our cognitive evolution is nothing more than a continual, if awkward climb up a ladder of representational metaphying systems, and activities — if we view it from a general enough perspective. There is nothing more than ‘the next step’, and occasionally we take a step that rather radically revises all we knew before.
There exist a set of root perspectives which are more essential than anything science or religion can or will deliver — not because they are ‘advanced’, but possibly for the opposite reason. They are elementally emergent from living systems in complex recombinance.
These ‘ways of knowing’ or cognitive ‘wings’ were developed long before symbolic language was born. They are thus the elemental sources of such cognitive activity — its womb, so to speak.
There are perspectives, and cognitive activities, vastly more ancient than language as we commonly think about it, and the same, interestingly goes for math. That our common conception does not allow or expose them in no way interferes with their reality or accessibility. What we are willing to believe, and habituated to reject, does, however.
Sometimes one may discover something new that is actually old. Still, in its time, such a thing may be new as though it were never seen on Earth.
During forward travel in time — shattering, reAssembly, evolution and compression wreak havoc upon the essential or superficial features of any signal or communication. This is an essential problem in modern archeology and religion, and these are two of the primary triangulation points we’ve selected to base our understandings of ourselves, as well as our organizational systems upon. Yet we depend upon them anyway, without closely attending the domains of the problem, its natures, threats and opportunities.
This ‘temporal signal distortion’ is evident in our machines and media (all of it), and our common experience of them — it occurs with compression artifacts in modern digitizations of film, for example. These artifacts are significant things — especially given a large enough sphere of time within which to expand.
Language is a ‘place’ where there is more than ‘enough time’ for serious problems with artifacts to accrue. Metaphor is no different. But, interestingly, with whatever ‘distortions’ may accrue, from whatever sources — some aspect of the source-signal’s nature is always preserved. Fascinating to think about. Useless too. What’s useful about this is that it can be actively followed. We practice something like this and call it learning. But there’s something a lot more like learning than the one we refer to. We’re drenched in it, and we aren’t seeing it clearly because a lot of our models are very faulty. They’re far too specific in their categorizations and implied relationships.
They have, in fact, large gaping holes in them. A lot of those holes are filled with mimics. These mimics masquerade as knowledge, or sometimes, ‘ways of knowing’.
Meanwhile, late at night, they have parties where they eat the children of the world. And in the morning, on the news — cognitively and in the real world — those assassins are parading around as the heroes and champions of those they’ve annihilated. That’s mimicry — lock, stock, and barrel. America was founded in precisely this way, and there’s thick forests of evidence that, rather than admit it and turn aside actively, we excuse, deny, and scalarly expand this essentially formative structure from our nation’s birth.
We might consider that, given the entire range of cognitive tools and abilities we believe we may touch or accrue, many of the essential shapeMeaning natures of these ‘things’ have been artifacted — they have undergone compression, hybridization, utilitization.
What allows us to gain an ascendant relationship with the metaphors we must choose to explore, record, or relate our experience? It must be something more powerful than mere language. Which parts of what we believe are ‘real signal’ and which parts artifact?
There is an essential and natural set of skills, animalianly emergent in us, which offer answers these questions. What’s more, they answer uniquely in each person, and each moment. In small, committed rings of ‘normal people’, these skills can transform our world, overnight. They work because of our uniqueness and diversity, and when those are threatened, we become cognitively ill. No pill or war will solve such illness.
It’s time to reMember the ‘imaginary’ rainbow-colored apple, and the treasures of our birthrights which it carries. And how it was meant to master the clock, whose everShrinking cages grow smaller and more constrictive with each passing instant.
It was time 2000 years ago.
Tick. Talk.
~#~
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Category: Thoughts
6 comments
24 Jan 2004 @ 21:09 by Dave Patterson @128.107.253.42 : Tully C. Knowles - Mrs. Flintoff
Interesting documentation of events in your past. Did you attend Tully C. Knowles in late 60s early 70s. I did through the 60s. I am wondering if Mrs. Flintoff (my 6th grade teacher) is still living in the Stockton area, or if she moved away.
Regards,
Dave
3 Mar 2004 @ 17:08 by : Mrs. Flintoff
I remember her. I was in a few of her classes. I think the class we saw Say Goodbye in was Mrs. Rouche's class. was there in the 70s. Your name is familiar :)
7 Jul 2006 @ 16:40 by Kenny B. @209.233.37.51 : Mrs. Flintoff
I don't recall Mrs. Flintoff but I recently did a search to see who's left at TCK and found Nancy Kjeldsen at a different school. A asked about all of my former teachers; Ms. Hensley, Ms. Sweet, Ms. Minor, Ms. Birdie, Mr. Heaslet, Mr. Randall and Ms. Bingham and all were retired or moved away.
17 Nov 2006 @ 21:36 by d destefano @209.76.109.186 : TCK
I had all the teachers you named above. Heaslet was bizarre. Feel free to write back and see if we know each other.
17 Apr 2007 @ 04:30 by @128.107.248.220 : Mrs. Flintoff
Yes, I had Mrs. Minor for 3rd grade, Mrs. Bingham for 4th, Mrs. Hawthorne for 5th and Mrs. Flintoff for 6th. Sad to hear some have retired and moved away, but not surprised. ;-) I would love to know how they are today. I admired all of them as they were very influential in my life.
7 Jun 2007 @ 21:38 by Kenny B. @209.233.37.51 : Teachers
I just checked back on this site and noticed a couple of replies. Regarding Mr. Heaslet, I found some interesting and alarming information about him from a former teacher after I left. Crazy stuff. Mrs. Birdie was awesome though, my fave.
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