Tree of Life: Netzach Sketch

Resonating with Inspiration

Rhythmic Mimicking

Energetic resonances roaming through the internal and external environments of life flow through the porous barrier of our biochemistry to become perceived. Once perceived, these resonances are energetically imitated by rhythmically shaking our hips, poetically manipulating the shape of our mouths, or plucking the strings of an bowed instrument. For a purpose that, if unraveled, points to the central seed of what it means to be human, this unique mode of reality-interfacing emerges when the structure of these inspirational resonances are mimicked or when artifacts imbued with that residue become crafted. 

These resonances, like human signatures, provide an identity for some confluence of forces, some state of being or becoming, that has happened in the past or is happening now. In trying to further define this thing, cultures the world over have created personified representations. Often these are known as "the muses". 

One of these muses is Venus. Within the confines of the Greco-Roman mind, this Goddess was the personification of fertility, sexuality, prosperity, and victory. Her form and principles have steeped themselves in the brew of the artistic mind for centuries at least, including the 1879 painting "The Birth of Venus" by William-Adolphe Bouguereau depicted above. Her features have been revered long before the birth of Greco-Roman culture, and many art historians studying prehistoric cave art and the piece-meal remains of archeological digs refer to all those voluptuous nudes dense with the beautiful curvaceous sway of erotic charm as "venus figures". 

The bulbous and swaying rhythms evoked by these figures motions us toward an apprehension of the world that breaks radically from the cold contours of Euclidean geometry. No more straight lines, life is curved. Why are these figures so alluring? Perhaps it's an innate aesthetic sense that's tuned to noticing the qualities of unity, harmony, and proportion and when these are expressed in certain compositions, we define it as "beautiful".

If the earth is assumed to be some type of sentient being, then the main purpose of humanity’s aesthetic sense could be to make Nature, or the gaian entelechy if you will, become more aware of itself. Through expression we become mirrors reflecting nature upon itself to aid in the development of self-aware consciousness. By decreasing  resistance to the electro-magnetic flow of inspiration, the circuitry of our bodies can resonate kinetically with the victorious sensations of the Netzach sphere.

Creative Injections

The need to express is expressive of our deep needs. Creativity, if looked at widely enough, is a fundamental element to all life. Humans, being life, have simply added an anthropocentric flair to it. A life-way open to frequent injections from the Creative Principle shows us how we are distinct (the part we play in the whole) and how we are similar (the whole we play in our part).   

Sometime in the mythical past, back in the days of the time immemorial, the idea of artistic creation emerged. But practical people like historical dates, so in homage to that demographic, let's say that since the Upper Paleolithic of 40,000 years ago and perhaps further, humans have sought to create records of the imagination through visual art, music, and dance. All over the world, skilled people have given form to a mysterious unseen sheen of life by crafting artifacts that communicate ideas, emotions, and experiences to others. Motivations like psycho-spiritual health and mundane utilitarian uses help form what is created.

Although the history for these records of the imagination span countless centuries, within the tumultuous geist of the 20th century, profound changes and expansions percolated through visual art, music, and dance.

Art

The classical understanding of "art" that dominated for hundreds of years before unraveled quick during the 1900s. Photography and other technologies more or less eliminated the utilitarian need to produce exacting reproductions of people or places.  Nature-imitation and the importance of objective draftsmanship became eschewed as more subjective renderings of internal and external environments were embraced. An internal truth was sought, one that expressed the intangible and spiritual aspects underlying the surface of daily experience. Early movements like the fauvists, cubists, dadaists, and surrealists, grew in their own right and sort of coalesced into the vision of abstract expressionism. Artists like Jackson Pollock created pieces of action painting by dripping paint over large canvases, placing the artistic emphasis on the activity of painting itself rather than the analytic or literary portrayal of some ancient mythology.

Music

In Northwest Slovenia a piece of cave bear femur with carefully spaced holes, known as the Divje Babe flute, opens up the possibility of musical instruments being constructed as long as 43,000 years ago. Since then, musicians have constructed instruments from bows, strings, and their voice, to communicate emotions, mythologies, and ideas in performance settings simply by alternating the relationship between sounds and silence.  These compositions have grown into certain rhythmic structures passed down to newer generations. Sometimes this hampers the spirit of creativity. In

 the 1950s and 1960s, jazz musicians like Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus sought to break up the conventions of jazz composition so it could return to its more primitive roots, assumed to be in parts of Africa. By individual and collective improvisation they cracked open new soundscapes of meaning. 

Dance

Dancing seems to be one of the oldest modes of expression, probably acting to create group identity in tribal societies long ago --- ecstatic trance-state dancing is still practiced by tribes and rave enthusiasts today.

 This form of nonverbal communication has been done in spiritual and performance settings to express emotions, create a collective identity, to exercise, and for social interaction. By coordinating breath and body movements in aesthetically pleasing and emotionally powerful ways, music, thought, and emotion can become rhythmically interpreted. Like most forms of expression, a conservative tradition can lead to a lack of vitality. To liberate dance from this stultifying state, twentieth-century innovators like Isadora Duncan, Merce Cunningham, and Loie Fuller dressed dancers in loose clothing and bare feet as they crafted kinesthetic expressions full of athletic leaps, free-flowing movements, and unconventional style's borrowed from non-western cultures. This grows into modern contemporary dance.

Oscillating Collectives

The above picture was taken at Drop City, an intentional community operating under the assumption that art was "all non-compulsive activity". The inertia of robotism that plagues the activities of daily life was be short-circuited so that our senses can allow a continual in-flow of energetic in-spiration, animating us like the breath of Athena does for the inert clay-creatures crafted by Prometheus. Once the muse becomes em-bodied, a distinct vibrational field oscillates around us. This energy, which has become integrated into our subjective experience, can be passed along to accrete into a collective resonance. This process is called entrainment. Back in the 1600s, Christiaan Huygens found out that two mechanical clocks positioned close-by would eventually synchronize their rhythms and function harmoniously. Likewise when two biological clocks (i.e. humans) are nearby, their rhythms can synchronize and function harmoniously. 

In bold white letters five paragraphs below the opening title on the ifdawn.com website is written a perfect summation of Netzach's potentials: it represents the outgoing quality of the ego, expressed by those who desire to change the world forever by their presence." The old adage of life imitating art shines its wisdom once more.

Tree of Learning: Hod Sketch

In-Forming Thought-Form Formation

Hod: sphere of glorious thought-forms situated on the pillar of form where intellect works to organize the creative forces of The Unfolding

Breaking Apart and Bringing Together

All those internal monologues and external dialogues plus the occasional external monologue and internal dialogue happening in the space between those ovoid protrusions some call ears makes up the activity of thinking. Intellects, those central organizing entities, extract a set of plucked bits from the contiguous gestalt of direct sensation; the bits are symbols. With the guidance of a logical framework, a collage of symbols become synthesized into some coherent shape; the frameworks are game-rules.
By experimenting with how this relatively straightforward process is done, insignificant babble can be separated out from the central aim of Hod: glorious thought-forms.

According to the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, glorious is defined as: 1. possessing glory; illustrious. 2. conferring glory; honorable. 3. colloq. splendid; magnificent; delightful (a glorious day). 4. esp. Brit. iron. intense; unmitigated (a glorious muddle). 5. Brit. colloq. happily intoxicated

Molding splendid-magnificent-honorable-illustrious thoughts into existence requires the process of thought-formation to be examined a bit deeper. 

Many become habituated through repetitive conditioning into a passive assembling approach, a sort of auto-pilot symbol manipulation. Whether meaning is inherent to symbols or emerges in context only, in either situation, the re-iteration of inherited ways of thinking can lead to a meaningless intellectual terrain. Originality in thought comes from tinkering with the symbol-rule relationship so that new meanings can arise.

These meanings can arise by a systematic process like the trivium or a spontaneously process like a poetic download. The trivium method provides a systematic way of thinking that can lead to an output of valid and sound thoughts. From a latin word meaning a place where three roads meet, the trivium is composed of three distinct yet interrelated parts: grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

The first step is grammar, this is the process of organizing a body of knowledge (aka thought-bits) from raw factual data by asking and answering the who, what, when, and where of a subject. This is general grammar, distinct from special grammar which relates words to other words within a specific language. 

The second step is logic, this is the process of taking that body of knowledge and establishing non-contradictory relationships among the facts so as to derive understanding. This is done by asking and answering the why of a subject and being concerned with proof, with establishing valid (non-contradictory) and truthful reasoning. Being familiar with logical fallacies (link) is a necessity for this step. 

The third step is rhetoric, this is the process of taking that knowledge and understanding gained through grammar and logic and turning it into workable wisdom. This is done by expressing conclusions derived from asking and answering the how of a subject. 

Spontaneous inspiration is a far more elusive method for meaning-creation, but no less potent. The many well-known eureka moments throughout history attest to the importance of cultivating inspirational spaces through internal (meditation) and external (feng shui, media) reconfigurations so as to allow more frequent downloads from the muses.

Centralized Organizing Entities (CEO's)

Personal intellects construct their architectures of thinking with materials built from a time-binded collection of human thoughts passed down through oral and written history. Inherited symbols and habits of manipulation become absorbed into the functioning of the personal intellect and condition how it grows. Just as genes replicate genetic blueprints and relay it across time, thought-forms replicate their blueprint by seeding into the collective mind and becoming woven into institutions. So how are these blueprints created and seeded? 

The Great Conversation is a name given to describe the output of western philosophical thought. Individuals contemplating alone, dialoguing with others, and building upon written traditions  flowing through the European continent for the past 2500 years have been using (mostly) a type of systematic thinking process to explore and reach workable conclusions regarding: Metaphysics-Ontology (what exists), Epistemology (what can we know), Logic (how we can come to know & express this knowing), and Ethics (what should we do with this knowledge). 

Now I'll white-wash, compress, and denigrate twenty-five centuries of philosophical ruminations into a few sentences of digital ink: during the few hundred years before the birth of the Gregorian year 0 when that mythical-magical carpenter was supposedly born, a cadre of teachers and outcasts laid down the tenets for western philosophical investigation. Metaphysical postulates like the dichotomy of a shifting world of appearance and an eternal world of Form led to epistemological postulates like the use of Reason, in mathematics and logic, being the primary method for philosophical knowledge. The time-binded collection of codices stretching from Augustine in the 5th century CE to Bacon in the 16th century CE expanded the Great Conversation into scholastic concerns, trying to reconcile philosophical reason with the dictates of Church doctrine, i.e. reason versus faith. Toward the close of this period, logical tools like Occam's Razor (don't make explanation's more complicated than necessary) aid in the emergence of the "modern era". This era sees a shift away from metaphysical concerns, or at least a convergence around the idea that "materiality exists---study materials" and establishing the relationship between reason and faith and toward an investigation of the material world as experienced by our senses and the growing profusion of new scientific instruments. Fuck the Church, All Hail The Laboratory! 

For thousands of years, oratory expressions and written texts have been working at this, thus setting down some basic premises that many thought-forms are built from. 

Control

The intellect's function is to organize the phenomena of life into a set of corresponding symbols; control is inherent. This isn't all negative, but a cautionary tale would be proper. 

As I've stated before, the changes that began 50,000 years ago and continue to accelerate today due to the Symbolic Revolution have as their basis the need to objectify and then control the world --- people, landscapes, whatever. The free flowing spontaneity of direct sensation that exists within an ever-becoming present is filtered into time-bound systematized packets within a less-immediate abstract realm. These realms become highly meaningful to many people, so those who seek control over others often use the symbols ("fighting for the flag" "spreading freedom" etc.) and the narratives created from them to elicit certain physiological responses from a population, seeking to galvanize them to act in a predictable way.

The time-binding process of history gives thinking and thoughts the quality of weight, the meanings inscribed therein are heavy and stay unquestioned thus being fodder for nefarious control purposes. It's the fear of questioning certain symbols or venturing outside the accepted symbolic territory that leads to these unhealthy relationships. Symbolic territory becomes established and, just like land ownership, is protected from perceived threats. Questions can be threats to those with comfortable answers, so the fear of symbolic meaning-thieves runs high.

Although bound by this inherent quality, the ropes that constrict our movements also allow us to imagine what it's like to live without them. 

Liberation

Yes there is danger involved in the enterprise of controlling thinking and thought-output, but this is balanced by the potential to liberate new meanings by controlling how the activity of thinking is done. 

The following methods are good to start off with:

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP): Developed by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in the 1970s, NLP practitioners learn to establish rapport with others by modulating how they speak (word tempo and choice) and breath for the purpose of communicating more effectively. 

Right Speech: Taught by Guatama Buddha many thousands of years ago, those who adhere to right speech abstain from lying, harmful words, or idle gossiping for the purpose of reaching a more liberated state of consciousness. 

Nonviolent Communication: Developed by Marshall Rosenberg during the 1960s, practitioners cultivate the qualities of self-empathy, empathy, and honest self-expression for the purpose of compassionately communicating with others and having needs met. 

Listening to motivational speakers, reading great poetry, practicing radical honesty, and learning about the winner and loser scripts of transactional psychology are all avenues ripe for exploration too. 

If meaning arises from how symbols are arranged and expressed, then controlling and tweaking the mechanics involved in meaning-creation would be an ideal starting place. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin found this out long ago when breaking up the habitual linear arrangement of thoughts through their cut-up method. Thinking can be viewed as a collection of chemical sequences to be deconstructed so as to study them in isolated atomic form (learning of their chemical make-up and community tendencies) and then reconstructed to form new chemicals; some of which are psychoactive. Chemistry is all about getting different chemicals to mix together, different classes of chemicals. Thinking that opens up new vistas of meaning is akin to a psychedelic experience. 

So what do chemicals do? They build human legs, the desert sands, and naked mole rats. Likewise, thinking builds realities. Time to make the realities glorious. 

Tree of Learning: Yesod Sketch

Wiring Beneath the Floorboards

Yesod: sphere of regenerative foundations situated on the unifying middle pillar where dreams, sexuality, animal instincts, and feminine-lunar energies cycle repetitiously and become embraced

Opening

To explore the hidden foundations lying below immediate perception, the “wiring beneath the floorboards” in the words of Terrence ‘the rambling bard’ Mckenna, is what yesod is all about. By appreciating cyclical patterns, shifting dreamscapes, sexual ecstasy, art from archetypal realms, and ethological insight, we can begin to navigate the cornicopeia of connections that network the foundations of our daily existence.
    
The psyche has been likened to an iceberg poking above surface water, with the insignificant tiny tip being our typical mode of awareness (short term memory, motor skills etc.) and the mountainous structure extending into the watery abyss below being our personal and collective unconscious. This mountain of unexplored structures can be uncovered and carried to the surface, so a more integrated reality tunnel can emerge.
 
Heedless plummet's to the deep abyss of psyche without previous experience's (dream interpretations, steady contemplation) or adequate provisions (trust, intention) can be fatal because the extreme pressure collapses our ability to breath. Despite the risks, it still seems preferable to a dull dehydrated death on the surface. 

Exploring

In the enigmatic opening lines of his magnum opus Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce writes of a "commodius vicus of recirculation". This simple line sets up a major theme, that of cycles that regenerate themselves. Everything from musical fugue's to the earth’s crust reanimates itself through dissolution, re-iteration, and a synthesizing integration. Our psychic iceberg’s regenerate themselves when foundational structures fracture, float to the surface, and become re-integrated into the insignificant tip.

The ocean as psyche metaphor works well because tides are modulated by la luna, the physical moon. This floating orb of deep mythical importance completes one life cycle, a synodic month, every 29.53 days. The barely visible outline of a new moon becomes sketched in by the waxing crescent and gibbous stages until it shines with full luminosity for a brief moment, and then it becomes erased by the waning gibbous and crescent stages until it re-arrives at a barely visible outline.

This celestial cinema only appears at night, when the surface flesh of Earth's body is cloaked by darkness. This is the perfect time for exploring what is normally hidden. It's during night that amorphous dreams skirt behind our closed eyes, briefly presenting ambiguous forms of the subconscious; it's during night that all the disfigures demons of horror films appear and disappear, taunting us with the knowledge that all is not under conscious control; and it's during night that the chthonic id expresses itself beneath domes of artificial light, releasing a slew of drunken belligerence, lustful fucking, and dominator politics (stabbings, fights, and robberies). 

Dreams

Freud famously called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious" but often limited his interpretation to a personal unconscious, a realm inhabited by sexual desires and power fetishes too taboo for the conscious mind. Carl Jung builds upon this foundation and expands it by nesting the personal unconscious inside a larger collective unconscious inhabited by archetypal imagery pertaining to themes beyond sex and power. Folks in the trans-personal school of psychology expand it even further, nesting the personal and collective unconscious inside a sort of cosmic-spiritual unconscious inhabited by karmic residue and entities alluded to in mystical traditions the world over. Even if disagreement arises as to how dreams should be interpreted, most agree that they're dense with potential meaning.

As the curved geometry behind our thin eyelids becomes overlaid with internal movies, we look inward (quite literally) to non-linear scenes crafted from an amalgam of memories, fantasies, and sense impressions. These visual puns encode messages with multiple meanings, but often dissolve into the background noise of the subconscious before we can grasp them. To try and remedy this, a variety of recording methods have been used to try and bring this material to conscious awareness. Jung's active imagination  works to open up a dialogue between the ego and the unconscious by transcribing the fleeting material into narrative's and artistic expression's. 
 
Horrors

A lack of control is what irks the ego about unconscious material, it won't conform to the dictates of conscious manipulation --- it appears and dissolves according to its own rhythm. This theme is explored thoroughly by horror films; in dark-moody atmosphere's, "enemies" are pulled toward committing heinous acts without conscious control. Perfectly normal humans shape-shift into scavenging werewolves beneath the full moon, robotic zombie's scour urban and rural areas seeking new victims, and blood-sucking vampires prey on beautiful women. Often it's an abnormality in their physical nature, mirroring an abnormality in their psychological nature, that motivates their violence (killing, rape, pillaging). These stories help us to understand the dangers of keeping subconscious material and automatic behaviors "in the dark". 

Ethological Interlude 

Humans are gesture-makers. Young and old, male and female, we all seek to establish relationships (with ourselves and others) by encoding messages inside gestures and signals. These are communicated, meaning they must be understood by both the sender and the receiver --- no one-way monologues! Through posture, chemical secretions, voice, movement, and environmental manipulation, we can find sexual partners, establish pack hierarchies, and protect ourselves from attack...or attack others. For a more in-depth look, flip through Desmond Morris' book Manwatching.

Immortality Attempts: aka Sexual Reproduction

All living organisms, from microscopic sea creatures to land-bound Elk, create new versions of themselves through sexual or asexual reproduction for the purpose of birthing new life lineages. During the pre-mating courtship, horny males and fertile females announce their readiness by arranging scents, smells, movement's, and voice into attractive displays. If all works out, it leads to the mixing of genetic material through mating. Sperm meets egg (“hey egg.. hi sperm”) and a newborn creation appears some time later. Post-mating, some creatures simply leave, while others stay together to form monogamous or polygamous families that raise young, eat, and sleep in a home territory.

 

Finding Your Spot: aka Pecking Orders

To designate roles and relationships in a social situation, creatures often play games of dominance and submission. The outcomes can change frequently -- whenever an alpha position is threatened --- so dominance only stays as long as you can garner obedience from others. To some degree, stratifying individuals into distinct alpha and omega roles is necessary for creating a stable social structure that will protect the proliferation of a species genetic code. In human societies, role-creation becomes a bit more complex. Insult Signals (high-class head tilt, mockery, phallic middle finger "up yours"), Status Displays (money, jewelry, cars), Submissive Behaviors (obedience, making yourself small), and a whole slew of subtle threats, acquiescence's, and comraderie tactic help when finding your spot.

Death Tactics: aka Defending and Attacking

Conflict seems inevitable in social contexts, but it doesn't always lead to fights. The purpose of the conflict determines the tactics to be used --- is it a hierarchical struggle? is it to impress a mate? is it to punish a broken taboo? Often threat poses (loud noises, making yourself big) that intimidate and instill the fear of harm is enough to assert dominance, without the need to actually fight. The submissive one shows obedience by making hirself smaller, often in a physical manner by crouching, pleading, or bowing to kiss toes and hands.

Not all gestures are for social situations. When alone, we still stroke our chin or play with our lips to bring about biochemical releases similar in nature to those released when we were breastfeeding babies; we crave comfort and safety. Some behaviors are instinctual while others become learned and integrated to such a degree that they are done unconsciously. A simultaneous dose of trust and skepticism should accompany these automatic behaviors for they ease cognitive overload but can trap us inside unhealthy and repetitive role playing. 

Integrating

So after peering beneath the floorboards to watch the primal networks of reality-making, what is found needs to be integrated into conscious awareness. The surrealists, with their interest in dream imagery and non-western art, sought to express a more pure and unmediated primal force by celebrating sexuality, ambiguity, and mystery. Through techniques of automatic writing, chance games, and letting go of the muse, these change-agents brought up subconscious material and presented it to the conscious light. 

Working under a more spiritual bend, tantra is a practice that seeks to use the energetic resevoir of the human libido to imprint unitive states of consciousness. Integrated modes of being rise to the forefront during sex rituals involving a female, mythically linked with Goddesses and the principle of feminine-creativity, and a male, mythically linked with Gods and the principle of seminal activation, unifying together, most beautifully expressed in the yab yum position above. Tantric philosophy views the body and the cosmos as the same functional system, so it uses iconographic worship, mantra, yantra, and sex-rituals in order to allow for a body-cosmic experience to emerge. A unified wholeness is what they seek.

“That which you have within you will save you

If you bring it forth from yourself”
    
--- Gospel of Thomas

Tree of Learning: Malchut Sketch

Living in This-World

Malchut: direct experience of the world sitting at the bottom of the unifying middle pillar where the downward flow of sephirah end to become expressed in dense material forms known to the sensing body. This is where an upward ascent begins.


Callin’ Planet Earth

Welcome to Earth. This 8,000 mile wide electromagnetically charged sphere with a bulging equatorial stomach is tied to a solar center (aka the Sun) and a pockmarked gray ball (aka the Moon) through an invisible cosmic umbilical chord that provides light-energy and gravitational nutrition. Earth travels like a wayfaring stranger along an orbital path circling the Sun, and while doing this it simultaneously spins on its axis at 23.5 degrees to produce unique circadian rhythms and our perception of time. A vast magnetic field encapsulates Earth like an enormous condom to protect it from deadly cosmic impregnation. This ethereal shield of flowing magnetism deflects harsh radiation (like the Sun’s UV rays) and allows life-giving chemicals to pass through, behaving like a planetary toll-booth if you will.
 

The main customer at the toll-both is sunlight jettisoned from inside the incendiary center of the sun. The light has traveled at, well, the speed of light, for eight minutes and covered ninety-three million miles to come upon our humble little dot floating aimlessly in a cosmic abyss. Once here it percolates down through the atmosphere and strips away some of its deadly baggage thanks to the magnetic field and the thermosphere-mesosphere-stratosphere layers. Only one-half of the sunlight that left its burning genesis eight minutes previously lands beneath the ten-mile high troposphere to hit the surface.
 

This is where it gets interesting. 

The Conditions...

Earth is dinstinct in the whole galactic community for it seems to be the only one that takes the raw energy of the cosmos  and makes LIFE. The funny sagging red chin-skin of turkey’s, the tangled geometry of invasive kudzu vines, and the assholes of elderly royal families only happen HERE. “Here” being defined as the convergence of land, air, and water that rests atop the Earth’s crust and below the troposphere-stratosphere barrier. 

As sunlight pierces through the chaos of the cosmic background and upper atmopshere, harmful impurites are stripped away and a balanced goldilocks zone is reached. Below this ten-mile atmospheric barrier is where all life resides -- a thin eggshell reminding us how fragile we all are. This is the biosphere, where all the earthians fight, fuck, and forage. 

It's in this spot that autotrophic plants, the primary producers, reach their cholorphyl-green bodies toward the Sun. Their bodies welcome the showering photonic rays, transmute it into usable energy, generate a planet-wide food-web, and sequester atmospheric carbon as a sort of afterthought. The miracle of photosynthesis is the first step in the 10,000 mile journey of life. As they grow, heterotrophic consumers mozying about start to eat these photosynthetic beings and take in their nutrients (carbohydrates, proteins etc.). When these consumers die, fungi decomposers recycle the plant and animal structures by excreting acids to dematerialize organic matter and feed it back into the soils which replenish life. 

A Brief Fungal Interlude

Around one billion years ago, fungi migrate to the land and a mere three-hundred million years later, they're already symbiotically aligned with trees and spread widely. Weaving into the topsoil that supports all life, huge swaths of one-cell wall thick mycelial mats help plants retain water and help the ecosystem regulate health. Their modus operadi is "stay open to hostile conditions, stay resilient" and it has made them incredibly adaptable life-forms. Fungi excrete acids to break down complex molecules from dead organisms that are then re-absorbed into the soil as nutrients for growth, thus cementing their role as essential mediators in the transition from life to death. They can ingest vast amounts of toxic chemicals and essentially denature them, a process known as mycoremediation. 

A few hundred million years ago, a geologic deep breath, the last common ancestor of humans and fungi bifurcates and the evolutionary tree splits directions. We still owe a lot to fungal innovation. For example, the sophisticated stomach's of most animals today is the result of tweaking a more primitive stomach that itself was based off the ability of fungi to encapsulate food in cellular sacs. We are allies. Medicinal mushrooms are well known to grow in forests --- yet another reason to stop our ecocidal behaviors. Taken as a whole, fungi, and mushrooms in particular, are as Paul Stamets says, “the neurological network of nature”; a sort of sentient membrane that becomes aware and responsive to ecological conditions and helps manage the life-supporting soils.

Back to “The Conditions”

Beneath the roots of primary producers lie an alice-in-wonderlandian rabbit hole of mystery and depth. A 25-mile oxygen-and-silicon crust lies atop an 1800 mile iron-and-magnesium mantle that itself rests atop a 2200 mile metallic-iron-and-nickle core. Inside the inner core, deep in the 12,000 degree womb of Ma’ Earth, metallic iron and radioactive decay slowly ascend through the mantle and crust to birth a protective magnetic field and give off planetary heat. On its way up, it passes by the viscousy lithosphere where the seven tectonic plates (Eurasian, North American, South American, Antarctic, Pacific, African, Indo-Australian) have a foundation. The topological structure of earth comes from these plates converging together to push land up, diverging apart to pull land down, and sliding past each other laterally. 

These multi-million year cycles aid in the forming of the six major biomes most ecologists recognize: marine, freshwater, desert, forest, grassland, and tundra. The salty-water of the marine biome, which takes up 97% of all water resources, is composed of coral reefs, estuaries, and oceans (five major ones with four levels of depth -- intertidal, pelagic, benthic, and abyssal) that are home to an uncountable numbers of species. This includes the vital algae that provide lots of the world’s oxygen and take in vast amounts of atmospheric carbon-dioxide. The remaining 3% of earth’s water resources reside in the rivers, streams, ponds, and lakes of the freshwater biome (with 70% being locked in ice --- ergo the water crisis), where essential food-chain building organisms like phytoplankton and zooplankton play their role. The desert biome covers about 1/5 of all land and includes semi-arid, cold, coastal, and hot climates, all of which breed singular creatures often not found in any other environment.  A vast spectrum of species and 70% of all carbon resides in the tropical, temperate, and boreal-taiga forest biomes that cover 1/3 of all land and have deciduous (leaves falling off in non-growing seasons) and coniferous (leaves never falling off) components. The grassland biome is bifurcated into temperate and savanna areas where the porous soils and quality hummus rely on droughts with intermittant fires to regulate ecological health. Some of the coldest environments on earth are the alpine and arctic tundra biomes that rely on the death of organisms to feed the soil with nutrients...harsh! 

The co-mingling of land and water is not enough for the trinity of life to emerge --- biotic beings need to breath! Not until the revolutionary days of the Oxygen Catastrophe 2.7 billion years ago did organisms learn to use this previously deadly chemical, thus becoming (polyrhythmic percussion's please...) aeorobic, or oxygen-breathing, organisms. Since then, oxygen has stayed at a 21% quantity in the air, balanced by nitrogen's 78% presence, and a 1% slew of other trace chemicals. This floating tapestry of invisible, life-giving chemicals helps regulate the water cycle, form climate patterns, and slow the loss of solar energy, so the theater of life will continue. All this tends to take place on the lower levels of the atmosphere, but that doesn't mean this is where the air “ends”. It continues to rise to a height of 625 miles until it merges with the cosmic pleroma and burst through on its journey to infinity. 


That Thing You Do

“Just as an apple tree ‘apples’, the earth ‘peoples’” -- Alan Watts

Earth not only peoples... it spiders, earthworms, insects, killer whales, and so much more. The alchemical processes that guide inert dead matter into the living, squirming, and twitching forms we all know are so well developed that recent scientific counting places the number of distinct species (similar individuals able to interbreed) at 8.7 million. If we rewind for about 3.5 billion years all the modern taxonomic distinctions dissolve into a common ancestor poking its way through the primordial sludge. Over scales of time that mock any notion of human longevity, this genesis creature clones, expands, and reproduces into a mindboggling bounty of biotic births. The human animal with its overwhelming urge to organize has split up these births into the following scheme: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. The model typically starts by defining genetic and molecular similarities and then moving to more apparant physical similarities. Collectively all these categories make up Life. This unlikely property is utterly dependent upon a mosaic of unique chemicals that weave into living tissue to continually re-alive themselves. This mosaic itself is utterly dependent upon a daily flow of energetic capital from the ol’ solar bank.  

To make sure there is enough of the vital chemicals going around, earth’s metabolic body coordinates its anatomy so as to carry out replenishment cycles. Three of the most important cycles are those of carbon, nitrogen, and water.
    

Carbon: Plants absorb carbon through photosynthesis, gain nutrients for themselves, and kickstart the food-chain. Eventually they die or work themselves into the digestive tract of consumer-animals who die, and a mass of rotting cells fall onto soils and sea floors. Microorganisms and other decomposers feast away and the carbon transforms into coal/oil (hydrocarbons) or becomes re-used for plant growth. Through burning fuel or the respiration of plants/animals, carbon gets released back into the air. And so it goes on and on...

Nitrogen: Nitrogen fixing bacteria living in the soil take in atmospheric nitrogen and reduce it to plant nutrients (nitrates, proteins, amino acids) that aid in the growth and health of structure's. Animal consumers chew this up, weaving the nutrients into their bodies where it helps create animal proteins and high level skeletal structures. As death rolls around, the skeleton vectors break down and nitrogen gets released back into the air. And so it goes on and on...

    

Water: A high-elevation and high-oxygen water source, typically glacial ice, melts and flows downhill through rivers or collects into lakes before ending up in the sea. Here it evaporates upwards to form clouds that migrate across the sky and dump buckets of rain inland, creating more water. And so it goes on and on...

Life is not the result of a rugged individualist attitude, it’s a communal effort. Life is what happens when a whole orchestra of cosmic, planetary, biotic, and abiotic solo’s play together. Once that unity is found, it continues to expand and complexify. 

Support System

Every society that has ever built institutions, fought for expansion, and crumbled into the  scattered shards of time and memory owes it whole brief existence to the conditions described above. The whole alive, ever-morphing earth with all its productions make up a finite Natural Capital --- the earth is bounded! Societies extract resources based on their percieved needs and, hopefully, replenish the gaian metabolism through regenerative actions. The delusional claims of infinite growth enthusiasts lead to an unbalanced relationship with the conditions that lead to life here on earth. This profound misunderstanding results in some very destructive habits (ecocide, species-cide etc.), but unfortunately, it seems to be the operating system of our increasingly globalized “civilization” (with the root “civil” being taken lightly).  

On the political and economic theater of planet earth, the main struggle seems to be between the process of globalization and centralized power versus the process of deglobalization and decentralized power. Couched in religious regalia, it’s akin to monotheism (one energetic, economic, and political structure) versus polytheism (many energetic, economic, and political structures). 

The centralizing structures include the basic geopolitical players I wrote about before plus a cadre of other globalized entities that often take the form of centralized banks or intergovernmental military organizations. These superstructures break down into smaller nation-state and local-county size structures where a bit more malleability and accounability lies. This coupled with money and war mold the socio-cultural air most people breath. Wallowing in cynicism is too hip and easy --- especially when real problems abound, problems that need the energetic motivation forfeited to the maintenance of a cynical attitude. 

Although by no means exhaustive, the Millenium Project has outlined the following issues as being of major importance in the globalized environment of the 21st century.

1. Sustainable Development and Climate Change - how do we continue to develop world economies (electrical grids, transportation systems, housing etc.), especially the "developing" countries, while staying within the limits and vulnerabilities imposed by a changing climate?

2. Clean Drinking Water - how do we share water resources in such a way that everyone on spaceship earth has clean sanitary water without causing significant conflict, both today and as population's grow and freshwater becomes more scarce?

3. Population and Resources - on a finite planet with a history of highly unequal resource distribution, how do we make sure that the 2.3 billion new humans by 2050 will have the necessities of life (land, food, shelter, energy)?

4. Democratization - how do we short-circuit the alpha male obsession with installing totalitarian forms of government and bring about more participatory forms of government across the globe?

5. Long-Term Perspectives - how to get past the "next election cycle" mentality that mires much of politics in dangerous short term "solutions" that have no regard for long-term consequences or goal-making?

6. Global Convergence of IT - as technologies develop beyond our ability to predict, become woven into most aspects of our existence, and form an intelligence of their own, how do we adapt to the changes brought about?

7. Rich - Poor Gap - how can resources and energy be redistributed in a more equitable way so that over two billion people don't have to scrape by on two dollars a day?

8. Health Issues - how do we eliminate deaths from preventable diseases, stem the force and size of outbreaks, and prepare for unknown viral infections?

9. Capacity to Decide - in a world of unimaginable complexity and oceans of superfluous information, how can people and governments work more symbiotically with computer systems to make better decisions in a timely manner?

10. Peace and Conflict - how do we remedy the conditions that lead to warfare and how do we stem the impact of new technologies of destruction (biological warfare, mass-destruction weapons etc.)?

11. Status of Women - how do we push for the empowerment of women (politically, socially, economically etc.) and promote gender equality so that the patriarchal historical trend can diminish and an egalitarian framework can emerge?

12. Transnational Organized Crime - how do we decrease the power and revenue stream of untaxed and unregulated global enterprises that profit from human and drug trafficking, money laundering, and other nefarious schemes?

13. Energy - how do we provide the energy needs of all spaceship earth without destroying its ecosystems, sucking up all the nonrenewables, and causing tremendous socio-political strife?

14. Science and Technology - as we become more dependent upon the innovations of practical science, how will it mold the world we are creating for ourselves?

15. Global Ethics - what ethical guidelines will help future decision-making as the world becomes increasingly complex, bazaar, and impossible to predict?

To steal, paraphrase, and add to the wisdom of a dead philosopher (or “the most dangerous man in America” if you’re Richard Nixon), the colors of our globe are not due to the soil being green or blue or red, it’s due to a bunch of anal-territorial primate gangsters pissing in colored ink to mark their territory. The reptilian brain is an old and powerful organizer of human consciousness, so despite the euphemistic tones of government agencies and think tanks, it’s often simple animal politics that run the show.

Domesticate Primates
 
Robert Anton Wilson in his jaw-dropping work Prometheus Rising suggests the term “domesticated primates” to talk about humans. Humorous and insightful, it’s a powerful reminder of our ape ancestry. The individual human is probably the most fundamental component of the larger political structures described above. So what is the individual human then?

On the surface, a bag of skin stretched over a skeletal structure of some 206 bones fortified with calcium carbonate and linked by joints and cartilage. Along with the muscular, nervous, endocrine, respitory, cardio-vascular, lymph-vascular, digestive, reproductive, and excretory systems, these make up the bulk of the high-level organ network operating within our bodies. Everything from circulating oxygen to analyzing incoming sensory data, from regulating breathing cycles to producing hormones, from disseminating chemical nutrients to fighting disease, and from metabolic alchemy to baby-making, is all done more-or-less automatically by these sensitive organ networks. These networks are composed of individual organs that have at least one of the four types of tissue (epithelial, muscle, connective, nervous) and can be further subdivided into cellular communities. 

Cells and the emergent intelligence of the communities they cohere into are one of the most important units of human anatomy. At about 100th of a millimeter in diameter, these self-sufficient life factories merge (meiosis) and divide (mitosis) to such a large degree that 100 million of them stretch across the terrain of the human animal and spread untold volumes of genetic and chemical information. Although they gestalt into vast ecosystems, a thin membrane defines the boundary of individual members, no matter how porous it may be. Beneath this lies a jelly-like cytoplasmic goo holding an orchestra of life-making organelles, like the energy gathering/producing mitochondria and the structure-building ribosomes. Most importantly a nucleus which holds 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs made of gene-sequences built from 5 nucleotides (adenine, guanine, cytosine, uracil, and thymine) and twisted into double helix DNA strands that store the genetic blueprint. This genetic code becomes read and transcribed into a phenotypic expression through a complicated process involving RNA, enzymes, and a host of other microscopic happenings, eventually making amino acid sequences that form into proteins and cellular structure's.

This whole process of structures within structures continues on down to the sub-atomic and quantum realms, and eventually to the conundrum of emptiness beautifully expressed in Gary Zukov's The Dancing Wu Li Master's.

Zooming out to an everyday phenomenological level, the human animal with all its inner biochemistry is stratified into two sexes, for the most part, and awash in a globalized sociopolitical-economic structure on the surface of an 8,000 mile wide earth that thrives off daily injections from a solar source 93 million miles away. If we drop the historical weight of cultural and religious codes imposed on everyone, it seems we become lone creatures in an environment devoid of meaning other than that we give it.

Essentially there are no essentials. We exist first and then any “essences” of good/bad, right/wrong, just/unjust become laid over an amoral landscape like a medieval cartographer trying to understand the world terrain. In existentialist speak it means “existence precedes essence”. We can choose to accept guidelines of meaning externally imposed or we can choose not to accept; either way we have to choose and meaning comes from these choices. We're caught inside the terrible responsibility of being "condemned to freedom" as Sarte wrote in No Exit.

This can be deeply troubling to many because the withering away of inherited meaning opens up a vast landscape of ambiguity and uncertainty, of meaningless-purposeless absurdity. Although terrifying at first and leading to the angst felt by most existentialists, this realization is a disguised blessing because it places the choosing self, with all the responsibility it entails, as the path toward freedom. No more unexamined clutching in fear to old codes, for that is acting in bad faith. As the subtleties of ambiguity and doubt become embraced, our perceptions become much more tuned to the world of direct experience. 

This tuning requires an attitude of trust, for we exist inside a nest of structure's way beyond our immediate conscious awareness. 

Tree of Learning: Prelude Sketch

Qabbalistic Mind Sketches

Like most curious apes, I fell asleep in school often. Although this crushing indoctrination program forces children to deal with an institution that attacks their natural curiosity on a daily basis (under the smiling-promising guise of “looking out for your future”), the depth of humanity's innate urge to tinker is too deep to kill. 

The o-so-long-ago uttering of Mark Twain still applies: “I never let schooling get in the way of my education”. The free flow of information and the internet in particular, with its webs of limitless information, make education simple. The main obstacle is structure --- how can I organize all these disparate bits of information into something meaningful? Being someone drawn toward knowing a little bit about a lot but not very much about little, an eclectic wide-ranging map that provides a comprehensive view is what my mind wanders toward. 

The Kabbalah is an ancient method and system of thought aimed at helping an initiate learn how her/his finite-bounded self is related to an infinite-unbounded divinity. In less religious terms, it's meant to establish context...and all meaning arises in context. This was done by studying the tree of life diagram, which splits human experience into ten static sephirot connected by twenty-two dynamic pathways. Through studying this, a psycho-spiritual evolution could occur. 

Luckily for those of a more pragmatic orientation who are not interested in esoteric illumination, the versatile structure of the kabbalistic tree of life can be tweaked so that one can better grasp the interior and exterior conditions of the modern human experience. For more on this, visit ifdawn.com

Beginning on Wednesday (10/03/12), I will post a weekly mind-jazz sketch for each sephirah until I've reached Keter on the tenth week. Below is a sneak peak of what you can look forward to...

Malchut: geology, earth science, economics, anatomy, existentialism

Yesod: sex, animal behaviors, dreams, surrealism

Hod: critical thinking, mathematics, NLP, right speech

Netzach: music, expressionistic art, love poetry

Tiphareth: golden ratio, self-actualization, neurocardiology

Gevurah: politics, mathematics, obedience studies, law

Chesed: praise rituals, mystical love poetry, sufi "wine intoxication"

Binah: world soul, korzybski's map-territory distinction, gaia-sophia

Chokmah: the fool tarot card, Leary's 7th and 8th circuits, Tao Te Ching

Keter: zero point field, mystical literature, implicate order