Gaia Consciousness
Thought for any Day
Jul 4th
“Behind the cliché that you create your own reality there is a shadow: If you don’t create your own
reality, it will be created for you.” Dean Radin “Supernormal”
I like Vadim Zeland’s ideas expressed in his Transurfing volumes. Perhaps the word create is too misleading. Perhaps it is better to say that you can make your reality. Vadim proposes that we can simply choose our reality by choosing a different life-path. He says, presuming that I understand correctly – forgive me Vadim if I don’t – that from the space of variations, where all possible outcomes from all past, present and future events exist, we can choose one more to our hearts desire. Vadim does not leave us in the space of hopefulness and details a method we can use to manifest this result.
I’m just weird enough to admit that I relate or believe this is true. Why, because I’m just crazy enough to have been using a similar method for years. I’ve also been crazy enough to state that we all, always get what we want. It is in the nature of being an Earthling that this is true. I continue to say that if you are not getting what you want, then there is a block and you are either fooling yourself by avoiding some basic facts about your life’s approach or you just don’t know what you want or maybe you are more comfortable holding on to those mechanisms that prevent you from changing your life because the state you are in has become a habit or brings you some benefit that you don’t want to lose. Whatever the case, if you are unhappy because of unrealized desires, then you must try to relax and dig down into your quiet spaces and look for what you might be fearing or dreading or avoiding. In a way, this state of constantly placing obstacles in the path of success is getting what you want isn’t it? In the digging down process, look for ways that you may be sabotaging your efforts to achieve.
There is no formula available. For instance, you may find that you will not allow silence into your life for more than a minute or so and thus you can’t access that quiet place within you. I suppose most unhappy people blame anything other than their part in their pathway. Unfortunately, if you don’t believe that you deserve to have what you want or believe that we shouldn’t expect to be happy or successful – that they have sinned or something – then of course, they will hold onto the path they are on.
Vadim’s first five volumes are published by O-books. Although Vadim is not a social worker or therapist you can have a look at what and how he approaches this subject for a mere fraction of the cost of a therapist. Perhaps a personal therapist would be easier and even more effective, however, for most, if you were going to avail yourself of their service, you would have done so buy now. Following is my favourite Zeland quote:
“The World is the Mirror of your attitude towards it”
Warming the Problem?
May 20th
As Martin Luther said “For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.”
It is not so much that we are having higher temperatures than normal. What defines normal? We are in an interglacial period which has in the past brought global warming. This is a cyclical event – one every 150k/years or so. There is no telling just exactly how warm it will get during this particular interglacial cycle. The important question is not so much why it is getting warmer, but why it is not getting cooler like it has in the past as the cycle turns back into a warm decline leading in centuries back to the, long glacial stage of the cycle? You might say “Oh well, maybe the downturn is just late and will occur in a few hundred years or so.” Observing the climb of CO2 is not surprising really because records show that the graph for average air temperature and the graph for CO2 are nearly synchronous. Which one leads and which one lags is controversial, but that they are nearly synchronous is not controversial.
Now here is the frightening news. The scientific research and media attention is focused on the causes of global warming. The warming event happened over 8,000 years ago.
We need to pay attention to the factors that we think brought down the CO2 and the temperature in the past 3 or 4 interglacial periods. One fact is the temperature dropped quickly, nearly as quickly as it rose. The maximum temperature period has always been short-lived. He present one has gone on longer than most if not all the previous ones. So be it. The two primary differences in the global conditions we face this time as compared to the past both are due to the presence of Homo Sapiens. We have caused extreme desertification coupled with a shortage of ground water and humidity and we have destroyed millions of trees and extensive grasslands. What sucks in carbon dioxide and expels oxygen and water vapour? We all know; vegetation, especially trees and the immense grasslands. I suggest it is almost certain that vegetation is the only possible reason for the steep fall in CO2 that can be observed in the graphs mentioned above.
The Milankovitch cycles and their interaction seem to me to reveal that the orbital forcing combination of eccentricity, obliquity and precession that favours cooling changed a couple of thousand years ago and it looks very much like we have missed a tipping point. Thus it may be centuries before the conditions again favour cooling. By then, our average global temperature may be so high that the tipping point cannot be reached. The following paper was written by two of the most distinguished researchers in the field of Earth Sciences.
An Exceptionally Long Interglacial Ahead? A. Berger and M. F. Loutre see: berger_loutre02.sci.pdf
“Most CO2 scenarios (15) led to an exceptionally long interglacial from 5000 years before the present to 50,000 years from now (see the bottom panel of the figure), with the next glacial maximum in 100,000 years. Only for CO2 concentrations less than 220 ppmv was an early entrance into glaciation simulated (15).”
(15). M. F. Loutre, A. Berger, Clim. Change 46, 61 (2000).
[We are at 400ppm of CO2, climbing at an increasing rate with very little hope of stopping anytime soon.]
The penny has been dropped many times but economic greed coupled with the backing of the 1% trumps common sense. I can’t recommend a workable solution.
I know this is a short explanation but I don’t wish to dig any deeper in this message. See:
The Seasons and the Earth’s Orbit – Milankovitch Cycles |
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/seasons_orbit.html
Or if you like my plain talk, see:
http://www.earthenspirituality.com/glogal-warming/
The Most Daunting Existential Struggle of our Time
Jan 21st
Paraphrased from:
Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change”
Taken from Chris Hedges: “The myth of Progress”
http://www.nationofchange.org/myth-human-progress-1358258958
“To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.”
Wherein lies the power of the internet?
Nov 13th
I’m reading about change, especially the fast pace of change in technology. It seems the significant thing is that the change is exponential rather than linear. Perhaps we still think in linear patterns and fail to appreciate how the rate of change varies when the expansion is exponential rather than linear. What prompted this bit of writing is the question around global intelligence. Is the internet intelligent? We hear it said that the power of the internet is growing at an exponential rate. But surely we need to think slowly [not exponentially] about the difference in information or data and just what makes for power. The power of the internet does not rest in the data stored. Just as it is with our brains. The power is not in all the data stored in memory. No, the power is in the connections our consciousness makes of the data. There will be no global brain from the data stored on the internet. As I said, the power is in the ideas and expression of ideas through the text and graphics. Yet again, the power is not contained in the text or the graphics. The power is in the consciousness that takes in various ideas invoked from reading, seeing, hearing and makes connections; makes relationships from out of what Sam, Joe and Sally say about the world. So, I’m saying that it is the relationships between and among the data that may be known as power. Of course, speed of data collection, speed of data access, the speed of our ability to input new ideas is vital. Timeliness counts when we see how a series of ideas funneled into our minds make connections and result in insights that form a whole. Perhaps we could use the word emergence. The connections and relationships that we make from the data results in a power that exceeds the sum of the parts, the sum of the individual groupings of ideas.
I realize that some of those who speak of the global brain and question whether the internet will become conscious are far more intelligent and aware than I. However, I insist that creative thinking, creative expression comes out of consciousness and I don’t mean just humans. Have you ever watched a crow use a serious of three different sized and shaped sticks to winkle out a morsel of food? It is amazing.
Many scientists don’t speak of consciousness; probably deny that any such thing exists. However, you can fill a person with data day in and day out and some will never gain an iota, a molecule of insight out of it. Lots of people don’t see the forest for the trees. The plight of the frog that will sit quietly in a pot of warm water and not jump out before the water boils and kills it so long as the heat is raised slowly and gradually. Many people just don’t see relationships. I like to call it connecting the dots. Think of an old style raster image on a television phosphor. What is there is simply a series of dots and that goes for colour as well as black and white. The picture is formed by your consciousness. Right? You weren’t watching Jack Benny or Johnny Carson, you were only seeing dots; a matrix of dots with a scan repeat so fast that it looked like movement of wholes, movement of pictures. I expect all the data that we would ever need to understand the universe is available right now, but we don’t know because we cannot see the relationships of the great number of energy structures before us.
As I said, I believe we need to ponder the wondrous nature of consciousness, find out just where it resides and how it operates: find out where it goes, if it does go anywhere, when we experience what we call death.
Time will be better spent with these questions rather than be concerned that the internet will become conscious and we won’t even know it! Finally, I say these things with all due respect to those who don’t share my interest or concerns. Horses for courses!
An Interview with Jorie Graham III
Nov 2nd
An Interview with Jorie Graham Issue 2 (August 2012)
Earthlines Magazine
“People were clearly not meant to live as they
wished to live on the planet, as I could see it. The mismatch
between this species – with its needs and desires – and this
place was evident everywhere … Native Americans, in their
early history, knew how to live on land. But we took care
of that. Oh it made me and makes me half-crazed at times
with grief, then with rage, then with just total bafflement.
Most of my poetry has spent its time trying to figure out what
‘being’ is – human ‘being’ and non-human ‘being’. How do
they go together. Can they. What on earth is human desire. I
knew even then desire was our illness, as well as our stunning
spark. It has turned out to be more our illness. Our terminal
illness. What can I say. That is what I write from and about.”
An Interview with Jorie Graham II
Nov 2nd
An Interview with Jorie Graham Issue 2 (August 2012)
Earthlines Magazine
“I feel that the en plein air descriptions of Never, a book written to
deeply make myself see, and thereby to bring into others’
vision, the natural world – from its microscopic life to its far
reaches of ‘evolution’ ( a word I still used in that book – a
number of poems are titled by that term) – are still, in spite
of their ‘understanding’ of the eco issues, innocent. I mean by
this that I had not fully downloaded it into my soul – and
also that I had not yet really gone deeply into the science. Sea
Change registers that shock. Place tries to recover a necessary
innocence from which to live and act. A ‘higher innocence’,
to avail myself of Blake’s terms. One that follows ‘experience’.
It is from there that we must act. Or can act. This has nothing
to do with explicability or inexplicability. Nature is not in
the realm of explication. So I do not engage with it on those
terms. I do bring language and mind up against it, into it, I
suffuse us with each other –but that is a matter of awakened
sensation, and its attendant awakened consciousness. From
there too one can, perhaps, act. But surely it is a prerequisite.
Nature cannot become an abstraction. That has been the
whole deficit in our souls which has brought us to this.”
The passage above reminds me of the situation where, to my mind,
we have not developed a language of spirit. Now I don’t mean the
spirituality of sky gods, the spirit of churches. I am trying to bring
to awareness an Earthen Spirituality but am humbled by my inability
to find a satisfying expression. Earthen Spirituality can be explicated,
but not in the accepted ways of knowing or expressing. Almost five
centuries of materialism has dominated the accepted worldview and
imprinted a template of what “is” and what “is not.” Again, I will not
accept that spirit cannot be explicated. As of the moment, it appears
to me that art holds the key. I have said that music is the language of
the soul. the Hsin Hsin Ming says: “Stop thinking and there is nothing
that you will not be able to understand.” One of my limitations is
that I keep thinking about how to stop thinking. I keep thinking about
what it is to not think. So, I am in a cage of my own construction, with
doors and windows yet stuck inside pushing at the door instead of
turning the door knob.
Bee Friendly Zones
Apr 11th
Copied from theTransitionTownTotnes Newsletter 65 – April 2012
Bee Friendly Zones with Bridgit Strawbridge [‘it isn’t easy being green series] and Phil Chandler author of ‘The Barefoot Beekeeper’ and an internationally recognized exponent of natural beekeeping.
We are really pleased that Brigit Strawbridge from the BBC2 series ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’ and a passionate campaigner for all types of bees, will be speaking alongside Totnes’ own Phil Chandler.
We’ve all heard about the threat to honey bees from colony collapse disorder but few people realize that Bumble Bees and hundreds of other essential pollinating insects are also under threat from pesticides, declining habitats and the loss of biodiversity in our towns and countryside.
Brigit and Phil will be outlining the problems but also explaining just what we can do, in our own gardens, allotments, streets and communities, to create Bee Friendly Zones. Not to be missed…
Tuesday 17th April.TotnesMethodistChurch. 8pm. £4/£3 conc.
My Latest book Review
Mar 1st
Thanks to Laurence Shelley for the review at the end of the page referenced below.
http://www.earthenspirituality.com/planet-as-self-an-earthen-spirituality/
The Collective Consciousness of Nature
Feb 18th
Gaia and the Evolution of Coherence
First presented at the 3rd Camelford Conference on The Implications of The Gaia Thesis:
Symbiosis, Cooperativity and Coherence, November 7-10, 1989, The Wadebridge
Ecological Centre, Camelford,Cornwall; revised 10.8.93
“Thus, it seems that the essence of the living state is to build up and extend the coherent
spatio-temporal platform for communication starting from the energy of the sun initially
absorbed by green plants. Living systems are thus neither the subjects alone, nor objects
isolated, but both subjects and objects in a mutually communicating universe of meaning. In contrast to the neo-Darwinist point of view, their capacity for evolution depends, not on rivalry or on might in the struggle for existence. Rather, it depends on their capacity for communication. So in a sense, it is not individuals as such which are developing but living systems interlinked into a coherent whole. Just as the cells in an organism take on different tasks for the whole, different populations enfold information not only for themselves, but for all other organisms, expanding the consciousness of the whole, while at the same time becoming more and more aware of this collective consciousness. Human consciousness may have its most significant role in the development and creative expression of the collective consciousness of nature.”
Mae-Wan Ho
Sky: So, in other words, the collective consciousness of nature is the consciousness of the living Gaia and we as humans have the possibility of a role in the creative expression of this consciousness. However, if we do not recognise our true place within, we commit not only suicide but ecocide as well. We are on a trajectory toward a runaway warming which will, in time, turn Gaia into another Mars.
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