Sunday, November 20, 2005
A Great Deal on the Latest Realities
A Wayward Guide to THE NAKED ANIMAL and his Vital Links
Oh, words are trains, for moving past
What really has no name.
--Paddy McAloon
Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the search for meaning in a meaningless universe and the struggle to succeed in a heartless system that it takes a steady, driving attack through many layers of bullshit to get back to my innate sensibiltites. And what are the innate sensibilities of the Naked Animal? They are simple; singular, in fact: The Naked Animal believes in the Golden Rule, and that's about it. Remember that one? Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
Yes, that's sophisticated English to some eyes, I know. In a recent casual survey, I found that nine out of 15 American adults over 30 could not tell me what the Golden Rule was, and five of those puzzled over the meaning of it for way too long once I uttered the phrase. Never fear, for there are thousands of other ways to say or describe it: What goes around comes around; What goes up must come down. Karma, some call it. You get what you give. It's the basis for all world religions, we learn it in kindergarten if not earlier on the secular side, and every pop star in the world has crooned about it in some way, yet real-world evidence of its machinations is slim. The best of us struggle often futilely to treat our small circle of closest loved ones with the respect we all deserve, while the stress of our daily lives keeps us from reaching out to people in need the way our hearts would like us to do.
Or maybe it's just me. I'm an idealist. And I'm not a frustrated one. I believe that consistently nurturing my ideals, in myself and in the world, is a worthwhile cause even if none come to fruition.
You really don't have to worry about believing in anything else if you follow the Golden Rule. Entrenched beliefs are harmful, anyway, as they can stop us from growing; one stays most salubrious with as few as possible blocking up one's circuitry.
What would a world in which the Golden Rule and no others in particular were meticulously followed look and feel like? Balanced, peaceful, full of straightforward, unsyrupy love. In other words, a hell of a lot different than the one we live in now. Our world's so out of balance that it's a wonder we don't go spinning right out of orbit into the nearest black hole. We can't see each other for what we really are or anything else for what it actually is because we don't even know ourselves. More and more people every year make tons and tons of money helping other people find themselves, or get in touch with their "spiritual sides" (as if they're flat, with two opposing surfaces); it seems like we're all struggling and pushing to get somewhere...but where? We've all been packing our bags for so long now that we've forgotten how to lock 'em up, send 'em through security, and actually board the flight.
"Finding out is the booby prize," my comrade-in-arms Philip is fond of saying when I get wrapped up in the what, why, where, when, who and how instead of the everlasting now. That used to really get my hackles up. "But I want to know," I'd whine. "I want to know what we're doing here and why we're doing it and where we're headed, and I won't stop searching until I find out."
I still haven't stopped, but I've realized that the search is its own discovery. And since I've gleefully jettisoned my need for resolution, my mind has expanded, making room for new information, which can't help but come rushing in at about six megabytes per second these days (Thank you, Comcast!) if one is willing to open the floodgates.
One day, my floodgates wide open as usual, I set out to find a thoroughly academic philosophy that mirrored my own idea that every single thing in the universe, from the tiniest quark to the universe itself, is a true, integral whole in and of itself, and that we interact synergistically to create copacetic collective entireties. Within a few minutes, I'd stumbled upon "Anarchology," an unfinished symphony of philosophic thought (which I'll be taking a more thorough look at in a later post) that takes complexity theory one essential step beyond its analytical roots. In a balanced world, the collective realities we create would continue to multiply in logarithmic progression to the greatest benefit of every single component of the master sum; in an imbalanced one, they stagnate and crust and confine, causing a great deal of pain and malformation in all sectors, like cancer tumors.
To use a less harrowing image, I'll turn to the good ol' web. Ever since I was a little kid, I've had a strong native understanding that everything was intimately, multidimensionally connected. That's what Charlotte's Web was about, at least to me. Throughout my childhood I saw and heard and read echoes of this web analogy in everything. I only slowly realized that everyone else in the world did not necessarily think this way--an important understanding for any budding idealist, since one can't be an effective idealist until one sees that one's ideals may not reflect everyone else's. At that point, idealism becomes a sort of activism in that one is just another human fighting for what he thinks is right, no matter how lofty one's conceptual framework might be. My job now is simply to do everything in my power to repair the oh-so-tangled web we've collectively woven (and the one I've woven around myself); and if required, spin a new one.
In fact and also in a virtual manner, that is already happening. Not only was I able to find academic validation of my childhood-spawned all-is-one philosophy that day, but I also found an analog or annex to everything that obsesses my mind and feeds my soul. This is reflected in the "Vital Links" section of The Naked Animal's sidebar, which represents my "chosen reality"--you know, like a "chosen family" instead of a nuclear one. The connections there create a template for my own version of the new and improved human web. The sentences I string together here over the coming months will hopefully help to fill in some of the gaps.
With projects like BBC's h2g2, an online "guidebook to life, the universe and everything," fashioned after Doug Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and spearheaded by the author himself, the Internet is filling in lots of gaps very quickly. It is now, at the very least, an ever-more complex interactive catalogue of human thought and knowledge; couple that with the way the Web works, through synapses and connections that scientists have compared to frontal lobe activity, and we've got a virtual collective human brain in the making. We can already manifest almost anything we want, be it resonant or discordant, material or etheric, at the fiddling of a few buttons. It always thrills me when fantasy crosses the line into reality. Now where are those personal jet packs the space age promised?
According to Howard Bloom, probably the world's most active evolutionary thinker and writer, even more amazing things are just around the corners of our minds. Bloom is a scientist who is systematically merging science, spirit and art to create a "Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe Including the Human Soul." Almost unbearably energetic and prolific, Bloom has already written more than any normal person could read in a lifetime. His website-that-ate-Manhattan, "Howard Bloom's Big Bang Tang Tango Media Lab," not only contains over 3900 chapters of the ever-expanding Theory, but also a multidimensional journey through the past, present and future of the human experience that fuses all disciplines, specialties and other paths into "a common search for creativity, empowerment, and truth." If you ever wanted a definition of life in ten words or less, there ya go.
There's enough solid thought and raw passion in Bloom's work alone to completely redefine reality towards a radically better way of living for the whole world, and he's just one in a large, interconnected circle of elastically-inclined geniuses, Buckminster Fuller, another unabashed idealist, being my all-time hero of the genre.
Bloom is running a close second, though. He comes complete with his own bullshit detector and a sly way with cynicism that covers the pessimistic viewpoint before its afficionadoes have had a chance to say nay. This is an important additional element to transformational science and philosophy in today's world, where cynical thought processes have become so ingrained that we are made to feel embarrased by earnestness the same way we're urged to feel ashamed of farting and burping--all three phenomena being entirely natural human processes.
I disappeared into the Big Bang Tango Media Lab for about 12 hours straight one day last week. Though I barely scratched the surface of even one of its many layers, I came away with an intensified feeling of awe and understanding that is now blending into a kind of instinctive wisdom that words cannot navigate.
Then I disappeared into the alternate universe of blogs, and it created the same transcendent effect. Here's a blog, for instance, by a respected but unheralded professor in Finland who's doing the same work Bloom is doing in his own quiet, academic way.
But it was the pulsating patterns of random insights and personal stories posted by my fellow less-informed seekers and observers that sent me, with a sort of scientific precisioin, into a state of ultra-productive lucid dreaming. The ability to engage in and produce a spontaneous combustion of wisdom and spirit is by no means confined to the superiorly-educated and well-publicized.
Now, I think I've introduced enough melding of science, philosophy, spirituality and art in the above paragraphs and the rest of my sidebar links that I don't need to philosphize about it any more than I already have here. My own philosophical construct (remember, the Golden Rule) is incredibly simple and I like it that way, though I do enjoy taking the old gray matter out for a brisk romp on a regular basis--don't want it to get flabby, y'know. Please explore my links at your leisure to expand your own inner and outer universes, and follow where they may lead--most likely to your very own chosen reality.
Meanwhile, I'll be doing what I think I do best: looking at the everyday in novel ways to reveal connections unseen from other viewpoints. Now that I've synthesized this cache of inter-connective information, I feel I can get on with it. I don't promise any arrivals at glamorous destinations, but I do guarantee an interesting trip.
Bon Voyage!
Categories: philosophy, spirit, meaning, omnism, anarchology, leaders, transformation
Oh, words are trains, for moving past
What really has no name.
--Paddy McAloon
Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the search for meaning in a meaningless universe and the struggle to succeed in a heartless system that it takes a steady, driving attack through many layers of bullshit to get back to my innate sensibiltites. And what are the innate sensibilities of the Naked Animal? They are simple; singular, in fact: The Naked Animal believes in the Golden Rule, and that's about it. Remember that one? Do unto others as you would have done unto you.
Yes, that's sophisticated English to some eyes, I know. In a recent casual survey, I found that nine out of 15 American adults over 30 could not tell me what the Golden Rule was, and five of those puzzled over the meaning of it for way too long once I uttered the phrase. Never fear, for there are thousands of other ways to say or describe it: What goes around comes around; What goes up must come down. Karma, some call it. You get what you give. It's the basis for all world religions, we learn it in kindergarten if not earlier on the secular side, and every pop star in the world has crooned about it in some way, yet real-world evidence of its machinations is slim. The best of us struggle often futilely to treat our small circle of closest loved ones with the respect we all deserve, while the stress of our daily lives keeps us from reaching out to people in need the way our hearts would like us to do.
Or maybe it's just me. I'm an idealist. And I'm not a frustrated one. I believe that consistently nurturing my ideals, in myself and in the world, is a worthwhile cause even if none come to fruition.
You really don't have to worry about believing in anything else if you follow the Golden Rule. Entrenched beliefs are harmful, anyway, as they can stop us from growing; one stays most salubrious with as few as possible blocking up one's circuitry.
What would a world in which the Golden Rule and no others in particular were meticulously followed look and feel like? Balanced, peaceful, full of straightforward, unsyrupy love. In other words, a hell of a lot different than the one we live in now. Our world's so out of balance that it's a wonder we don't go spinning right out of orbit into the nearest black hole. We can't see each other for what we really are or anything else for what it actually is because we don't even know ourselves. More and more people every year make tons and tons of money helping other people find themselves, or get in touch with their "spiritual sides" (as if they're flat, with two opposing surfaces); it seems like we're all struggling and pushing to get somewhere...but where? We've all been packing our bags for so long now that we've forgotten how to lock 'em up, send 'em through security, and actually board the flight.
"Finding out is the booby prize," my comrade-in-arms Philip is fond of saying when I get wrapped up in the what, why, where, when, who and how instead of the everlasting now. That used to really get my hackles up. "But I want to know," I'd whine. "I want to know what we're doing here and why we're doing it and where we're headed, and I won't stop searching until I find out."
I still haven't stopped, but I've realized that the search is its own discovery. And since I've gleefully jettisoned my need for resolution, my mind has expanded, making room for new information, which can't help but come rushing in at about six megabytes per second these days (Thank you, Comcast!) if one is willing to open the floodgates.
One day, my floodgates wide open as usual, I set out to find a thoroughly academic philosophy that mirrored my own idea that every single thing in the universe, from the tiniest quark to the universe itself, is a true, integral whole in and of itself, and that we interact synergistically to create copacetic collective entireties. Within a few minutes, I'd stumbled upon "Anarchology," an unfinished symphony of philosophic thought (which I'll be taking a more thorough look at in a later post) that takes complexity theory one essential step beyond its analytical roots. In a balanced world, the collective realities we create would continue to multiply in logarithmic progression to the greatest benefit of every single component of the master sum; in an imbalanced one, they stagnate and crust and confine, causing a great deal of pain and malformation in all sectors, like cancer tumors.
To use a less harrowing image, I'll turn to the good ol' web. Ever since I was a little kid, I've had a strong native understanding that everything was intimately, multidimensionally connected. That's what Charlotte's Web was about, at least to me. Throughout my childhood I saw and heard and read echoes of this web analogy in everything. I only slowly realized that everyone else in the world did not necessarily think this way--an important understanding for any budding idealist, since one can't be an effective idealist until one sees that one's ideals may not reflect everyone else's. At that point, idealism becomes a sort of activism in that one is just another human fighting for what he thinks is right, no matter how lofty one's conceptual framework might be. My job now is simply to do everything in my power to repair the oh-so-tangled web we've collectively woven (and the one I've woven around myself); and if required, spin a new one.
In fact and also in a virtual manner, that is already happening. Not only was I able to find academic validation of my childhood-spawned all-is-one philosophy that day, but I also found an analog or annex to everything that obsesses my mind and feeds my soul. This is reflected in the "Vital Links" section of The Naked Animal's sidebar, which represents my "chosen reality"--you know, like a "chosen family" instead of a nuclear one. The connections there create a template for my own version of the new and improved human web. The sentences I string together here over the coming months will hopefully help to fill in some of the gaps.
With projects like BBC's h2g2, an online "guidebook to life, the universe and everything," fashioned after Doug Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and spearheaded by the author himself, the Internet is filling in lots of gaps very quickly. It is now, at the very least, an ever-more complex interactive catalogue of human thought and knowledge; couple that with the way the Web works, through synapses and connections that scientists have compared to frontal lobe activity, and we've got a virtual collective human brain in the making. We can already manifest almost anything we want, be it resonant or discordant, material or etheric, at the fiddling of a few buttons. It always thrills me when fantasy crosses the line into reality. Now where are those personal jet packs the space age promised?
According to Howard Bloom, probably the world's most active evolutionary thinker and writer, even more amazing things are just around the corners of our minds. Bloom is a scientist who is systematically merging science, spirit and art to create a "Grand Unified Theory of Everything in the Universe Including the Human Soul." Almost unbearably energetic and prolific, Bloom has already written more than any normal person could read in a lifetime. His website-that-ate-Manhattan, "Howard Bloom's Big Bang Tang Tango Media Lab," not only contains over 3900 chapters of the ever-expanding Theory, but also a multidimensional journey through the past, present and future of the human experience that fuses all disciplines, specialties and other paths into "a common search for creativity, empowerment, and truth." If you ever wanted a definition of life in ten words or less, there ya go.
There's enough solid thought and raw passion in Bloom's work alone to completely redefine reality towards a radically better way of living for the whole world, and he's just one in a large, interconnected circle of elastically-inclined geniuses, Buckminster Fuller, another unabashed idealist, being my all-time hero of the genre.
Bloom is running a close second, though. He comes complete with his own bullshit detector and a sly way with cynicism that covers the pessimistic viewpoint before its afficionadoes have had a chance to say nay. This is an important additional element to transformational science and philosophy in today's world, where cynical thought processes have become so ingrained that we are made to feel embarrased by earnestness the same way we're urged to feel ashamed of farting and burping--all three phenomena being entirely natural human processes.
I disappeared into the Big Bang Tango Media Lab for about 12 hours straight one day last week. Though I barely scratched the surface of even one of its many layers, I came away with an intensified feeling of awe and understanding that is now blending into a kind of instinctive wisdom that words cannot navigate.
Then I disappeared into the alternate universe of blogs, and it created the same transcendent effect. Here's a blog, for instance, by a respected but unheralded professor in Finland who's doing the same work Bloom is doing in his own quiet, academic way.
But it was the pulsating patterns of random insights and personal stories posted by my fellow less-informed seekers and observers that sent me, with a sort of scientific precisioin, into a state of ultra-productive lucid dreaming. The ability to engage in and produce a spontaneous combustion of wisdom and spirit is by no means confined to the superiorly-educated and well-publicized.
Now, I think I've introduced enough melding of science, philosophy, spirituality and art in the above paragraphs and the rest of my sidebar links that I don't need to philosphize about it any more than I already have here. My own philosophical construct (remember, the Golden Rule) is incredibly simple and I like it that way, though I do enjoy taking the old gray matter out for a brisk romp on a regular basis--don't want it to get flabby, y'know. Please explore my links at your leisure to expand your own inner and outer universes, and follow where they may lead--most likely to your very own chosen reality.
Meanwhile, I'll be doing what I think I do best: looking at the everyday in novel ways to reveal connections unseen from other viewpoints. Now that I've synthesized this cache of inter-connective information, I feel I can get on with it. I don't promise any arrivals at glamorous destinations, but I do guarantee an interesting trip.
Bon Voyage!
Categories: philosophy, spirit, meaning, omnism, anarchology, leaders, transformation
