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Dear Readers,
There is a secret few are talking about. I’m whispering, Shhh, here’s the secret: we are a SPECIES, living on a PLANET, and the SUN nurtures Nature for our nourishment. Be sure not to tell anyone else.
Okay, I’m back to talking normal. Can you hear me? Maybe too many Earthlings take the Sun for granted. Some think it doesn’t do anything up there but shine. Without the Sun, we’d be breathless, and photosynthesis just happens, so we gawk about how it works, and then go on and forget about it.
I think we should start blaming the Sun for everything, including good hair days, bad hair days, eating well, excessive indulgences, burned-out light bulbs, mental episodes and overload, global warming, global cooling, or climate change or whatever the term du jour. Would we Earthlings then talk and think more about Sun cycles?
I’ve just remembered a too neglected idea, and that idea is our species is not invincible. Humans are like all other species: over spans of unimaginable time, species are birthed into their presence on and in Earth, thrive for a while, and disappear. We Earthlings tend to forget, then gawk, then forget again how vulnerable our species is.
Although the original outline of this ezine was meant for an entirely different conversation, I noticed TED (technology, entertainment, design) dot com had announced The WorldWide Telescope. I thought it imperative to include the announcement here at the start, because the most recent Staying Awake introduced possibilities of humans’ new story. The WorldWide Telescope will allow millions of Earthlings to imagine our species’ relations with the Sun and the physical Universe.
Scientists report we humans invented and used tools some 2.5 million years ago. When we compare 2.5 million years to 13.7 billion years (as the presumed age of our physical Universe), we begin to see our species as a mere instant in all of known creation. Further, compared to the size of Planet Earth, we Earthlings are just itty bitty geological stalks of strutting flesh. Were we not birthed out of mixtures of Earth’s soil and water? Remembering to add our physical bodies’ evolution to our personal cosmologies, I’d say we litt’l rascals are wholly significant!
Our Personal Universes
We already know that galaxies, some like our Milky Way, extend far beyond the Milky Way. We can already see out to the edge of our observable Universe, all the way back in time, almost to the moment of the Big Bang, itself. We can see all across the whole spectrum of light, revealing worlds that had previously been invisible. We see magnificent star nurseries, where Nature has somehow arranged just the right numbers and just the sizes of stars to be born for life to arrive.
We see alien worlds; we see more than three hundred solar systems, and those systems are unlike ours. Where time itself seems to stand still, black holes are seen at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy and elsewhere in the Universe.
Until now, our view of the Universe and our cosmologies had been disconnected and fragmented, partly due to medieval educational systems that undermined the physical sciences too much, and, since the 1970s, business curricula constrained relevant scientific studies (not to speak of performing arts) in universities. The marvelous stories Nature has to tell us have fallen through the cracks, but that’s changing. How come?
The WorldWide Telescope takes the best images from the world’s greatest telescopes on Earth and in space, and weaves the images seamlessly to produce a wholistic view of the Universe. We Internet viewers of the Universe will be able to create our own personal universes on Internet, and send our particular universe to family and friends to view and discuss. Voila! Millions of Earthlings will participate in making up their own stories and cosmology. Imagine… our gaze into the Universe fills the Universe, and we’re beginning a conscious converse with it!
The telescope will change the way scientists do astronomy; it’s going to change the way astronomy is taught; and, perhaps, most importantly, it’s going to change the way we see our species as part of the Universe.
The WorldWide Telescope will introduce three important ideas, which I’ll let the TED talk explain. The video is mostly dark, because the darkened auditorium allowed beautiful projections to be seen by the audience. In the beginning of the video, you’ll hear the voice of the speaker; 44 seconds later, you’ll see the first galaxy move into frame. Refer TED talk by Roy Gould, astronomer; turn down your speakers’ volume before clicking; duration 6:43.
| Sometimes click videos twice to begin. |
| After viewing, it might be necessary to refresh your screen by pressing the F5 key on your Windows keyboard. |
Felt yet Unseen
When was the last time you went outdoors after sundown to watch the stars? Watching the stars and marveling over astronomy is one thing, and it’s another thing to think about a great work we humans will have thrust upon us here on Earth in the 21st century.
The great work is not small; it includes all humans. The work appears while regarding what is felt yet unseen. All humans feel all the time. Some humans have words to talk about feelings while others don’t until they must, but out of feelings come what we Earthlings are totally good at—gawking.
A close second to gawking is measuring stuff. We measure vibrations, all of which Nature is elegantly and stunningly composed. We measure stuff we gawk at like the Earth, Moon, Sun, and distances from objects to other objects within the Universe.
We measure our waists for belts, feet for shoes, heads for hats, legs for pants. We measure floors for rugs, windows for glass, walls for paint, properties for houses. We measure budgets so we can buy all that stuff.
Staring very quietly in our faces is the felt yet unseen, and the unseen isn’t easily measured. However, during recent five decades, groups of men, without empathic or altruistic notions, have accumulated measured information. Without our consent, measuring and controlling the collective psychical being—all intentions, possibilities, tendencies—of large populaces of citizenries has become experimentally automated via computer. ¹
After percentages are added to mathematical formulas for, say, propaganda, then paranoia begins binding the psyché of many female and male public servants and scientists for compliance with computer devised possibilities. National leaders, pitted against each other, are negated by hierarchy if leaders (even our favorite ones) don’t play by rules in a manufactured meme of ‘freedom for humanity’ as a façade for personal gain. ²
We taxpaying hirelings are doing our best to exist in confused worlds designed for felt yet unseen explorations in comprehension. Within our personal cosmologies, our great work is to stay awake; to feel, to read, and become savvy to vibrational intricacies of the physical heart and brain and body. In what beliefs and lifestyles have we already begun intuiting vexations that could become rapidly paramount within global citizenries?
Individual Freedom
At the heart of Earthlings’ great work are nations’ leaderships of men, who measure themselves against each other. Their hierarchies declare a delusive idea of individual freedom for all humankind: a new world in which we are free to choose our lives; not to be trapped by class or income into predestined roles; to liberate the individual. When one looks back over the most recent eight years, we discover the kind of freedom proclaimed by men, and supported by some women, has turned peculiar and ever so quickened.
Empathy and altruism seem unseen in a peculiar freedom, a freedom opposing an inclusive nature by narrow, indulgent purchasing powers of money. Debt, a form of psychological slavery, has become individual freedom’s trap out of which we are required to calculate ourselves into comfortable and vibrant living. Elephantine bankers with their nosey system might be enjoying their joke on citizens, but taxpayers are not laughing.
When computerized targets and quotas are output as results, then economists and marketers force massive, persuasive insinuations into media. Without considering options, many Earthlings are quickly manipulated by advertisers’ behavioral-specific messages for us to ‘stop global warming,’ ‘buy a green car,’ ‘buy better insurance with you in mind,’ ‘bring democracy home,’ or ‘fight terrorism.’ Too few are awake to cycles of calculated persuasive ambiguities accelerated via media into any citizenries, in any geographical locations, in any pre-determined times.
The attempt to liberate people with a firm hand of democracy, for example in AFGHANISTAN and IRAQ, led to an increased rise of a controlling system of management driven by maximized competitions for gains, goals, incentives, targets, and quotas. Forecasted statistics and goals have been incentivized (a corporate word) for anything imaginable from numbering cafeteria wares to armaments sold to lives lost—into a cyclic computer analysis of corporate capitalism.
Computer generated numbers also create simulated models of global products and services (or free markets, or a money-driven market democracy). At any level in hierarchy committed to a delusive individual freedom of choice, USA and UK public servants have actually presided over increases in citizen inequalities, severe collapses in social mobility, and a mobilized anti-democractic, authoritarian, religious fundamentalism.
Most importantly, the consequence has been what leaders proclaimed would not occur: the return of class power and privilege in the USA and UK. Manly decisions and errors based on computer enhanced gains, goals, incentives, targets, and quotas have brought to fruition a strange paradoxical world during a relatively short measure of time.
| Hover your cursor here to read an excerpt from George Orwell’s essay on language. ³
[…] The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, fascism, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides.
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. […] Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. brackets are mine |
Our Weakest Link
It’s about controlled, psychological experiments measured and reported for any geographical locations, for any given historical times, with given psychical manipulations by governances and religious fundamentalists: the shame factor—our weakest link—is ubiquitous. As we know, shame has with it feelings of not belonging; regret; feeling separate from each other.
A form of generating certain illusions for separation was mathematically derived in the 1950s by Game Theory (as in paranoic gamblers sitting around a table, holding cards that are secret from other players). As the theory goes, a measured effect of shame comes from paranoia, out of which many Earthlings have been trained to monitor, strategize, adjust, and optimize what they want against optimized wants of another, ever widening yet stabilizing the sense of separation from each other.
Here’s another observation of game theory. Players suspect other players’ paranoia due to whatever resources one player wants from another, and all exchanges between players become the equilibrium, the rules of the game. So, if one player chooses not to cooperate, the equilibrium ends, and what was quiet chaos could show up clamorous. Refer Wikipedia
Variations of game theory eventually filtered throughout RAND and the military industrial-complex by computer generated performance initiatives. Relevant incentives were promoted as factors of shame—our weakest link—if a player chose not to play the game properly. At various times, modeled incentives for personal gain have been accepted by various nations’ leaders and politicians.
I thought that game theory is liken to what we’ve called human nature, but not exactly: game theory exposes the gnarled nature of the hierarchical man’s world in which we live, nay, for millennia squeezing (feminine, inclusive) intuition through a funnel into narrowed perceptions, expressed in exclusively masculine terms. How could the theory explain anything other than a global measurement of a pseudo equilibrium, managed by money and paranoia, in the ruthless male-trained world? In what ways does the theory reveal games within personal relationships?
Psychologically, women and children too often loose. Their cyclic losses and gains disappear in endlessly factored equations and projections for more scientifically modeled behavior, which molds minds into stiffened societies plagued by myopic advertisers, at any pre-determined times, in any geographical locations. We global sisters and brothers have a great work in front of us: for starters, mentally managing the global market place of conflicting memes, while staying awake to a diminution of democracy—of and by and—for the people, while collectively integrating the simplest mysteries of our species and the physical Universe.
It is our job to stay awake to a man’s world caustically ruled by secrets, while simultaneously awake to a transparent, amiable world as much as we may intuit the world to be. I gawk, sometimes upset to a point of getting up and moving away from the documents I’m reading, or from a documentary I’m viewing, which report unimaginable, galling ploys that invisibly stalk Earthling sensibilities. I gawk at nearly every unnoticed nuance brought to my attention, and wittingly put on my curiosity cap!
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