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Good Day, Everyone!
My goodness, unavoidable circumstances in family matters have deepened the way I view living, but family matters have greatly decreased the time for reading, thinking and writing about the geopolitical arenas in which you, me, and our global sisters and brothers must live.
Staying Awake ezine will be published only a few times this year. There’s yet a schedule for publications, so both you and I will be surprised to see the next few ezines. Again this year, the Sun shows up in the ezine’s banner as a reminder that that ball of light above our heads is as unpredictable as NASA scientists presume that it is predictable. Many of us science-friendlies look forward to noticeable sunspot activity.
As an annual repeat, it’s time again to remember the synchronicity that eventually pivoted my want for writing into publishing an ezine in January, 2004.
A Synchronous Moment
In June, 2003, it came to mind that my dad passed away nearly four years ago. Sitting there quietly researching at my computer, I looked up to the wall where his photo hung, and asked, with a bit of tongue in cheek, ‘If you’re around, let me know in a way I don’t have to guess it’s you.’ That request alone was enough to surprise me!
Maybe minutes later, I received what at first I thought was an unsolicited email. It seems a business man, Derek, had had a visit from a spammer who visited his web site to add who knows how many email addresses, like mine, without permission. In his email, Derek expressed his apologies about the incident.
Needless to say, I was curious about Derek’s enterprise, and went to surf his site, Smile At You. When I read that web address, my jaw dropped.
Derek was an artist, an excellent wood carver. Golly, my dad was a wood carver, too! Dear readers, if I hadn’t been awake and curious, I would’ve missed that near instantaneous nudge to notice what had occurred, and I would’ve missed a reason to gawk.
That narrative illustrates what many of us believe: however mysteriously, unimaginable energies can cause “Surprise!” instances that catch us off guard, and can, even for a moment, remind us that the Universe’s energies swirl and whorl, keeping our bodies in tact with vibrational forces we cannot imagine.
The Imaginable
On the other hand, there’s plenty of the imaginable to keep USA citizens readily distracted and anxious yet apparently content with negligible information the world’s despicable rulers allow us. I might be behind in my reading, but I’m not behind in thoroughly healthy curiosities and cynicisms for all things psychological, religious, governmental and political.
Thusly, my personal cosmology is alive and well, and debates continue with male-dominated people who believe the only extant world is the bubble out of which they can imagine and live—for them, no thinking is required. Eventually, those narrow points of view slither on bellies of oppression into the global systems’ monetary and economic machine.
The quote that follows challenges many of us to examine our personal cosmologies partially defined by war mongers astute in cowardice and vanity borne in genocidal ethics.
We are, of course, already dead. There is no hope. The machine is too powerful, the damage too severe. There are too many child abusers, too many rapists, too many corporations, too many tanks and guns and airplanes. And I’m just one person; I can’t do anything. You’re dead right, so what the hell are you waiting for? An Irish friend of mine once told me his favorite saying: “Is this a private fight, or can anyone enter?” Give up. Capitulate. Realize there’s no hope, then have at it. If you’re dead, you have nothing to lose and a world to gain.
~ Derrick Jensen (b 1960), American author, environmental activist ¹
The Great Work
The words ‘a world to gain’ pointed my attention to the following notes by Brian Swimme, mathematical cosmologist at California Institute of Integral Studies. His vision and its story help balance my feelings regarding our present world at-large.
“In 1543 Copernicus announced to a startled Europe that the Earth was not stationary, but was sailing rapidly through space as it spun around the Sun. This was difficult news to take in all at once, but over time the Europeans reinvented their entire civilization in light of this strange new fact about the Universe. The fundamental institutions of the medieval world, including the monarchies, the church, the feudal economic system, and the medieval sense of self, melted away as a radically different civilization was constructed.
“We live in a similar moment of breakdown and creativity. The cosmological discovery that shatters nearly everything upon which the modern age was built is the discovery that the Universe came into existence 13.7 billion years ago and is so biased toward complexification that life and intelligence are now seen to be a nearly inevitable construction of evolutionary dynamics. Our new challenge is to reinvent our civilization. The major institutions of the modern period, including that of agriculture and religion and education and economics, need to be re-imagined within an intelligent, self-organizing, living Universe, so that instead of degrading the Earth’s life systems, humanity might learn to join the enveloping community of living beings in a mutually enhancing manner. This great work will surely draw upon the talents and energies of many millions of humans from every culture of our planet and throughout the rest of the 21st
century.” ²
~ Brian Swimme dot org
Through a Prism
Swimme’s heralding the evolving ‘great work’ is Staying Awake’s proclamation, too. Many of us are very much curious about what’s occurring globally, and it’s likely we wake up each morning wondering what happened to the great work on every continent while we were sleeping.
Staying Awake does not let us forget the millennia in which innumerable humans’ cosmologies were very quickly and forcibly altered, or very gradually directed this way or that for pleasures of the virulent masculine:
more times than not, women have been and are still more honest and intuitive while continuing to suffer unethical men too much.
It’s too easy for the great work of rulers and warlords to become a manufacture of religious delusions, which are still perceived through a prism for distracting innocent and unknowing human Earthlings from the very source of their natural natures: the Universe. ³
To this very day, we live inside a ruling group mind, a prism of complicities as demagogues and a corporate-branded Obamessiah continue to market protection of the CIA and Bush regime from criminal investigations; to escalate the Afghan war; to distribute trillions in currencies to banksters, all of which maintain the machine that upsets citizenries’ imaginations.
The obsessive compulsive demonstrations by white male dominated greed continue preposterous authorizations for the build up of one society by plundering another. For example, USA government’s primary export is armaments and security forces. So, what would you suppose is USA government’s primary marketing strategy? Certainly, selling armaments to nations’ governments that do not want peace on land, sea, or air. Refer USA military doctrine for full-spectrum dominance and Project for the New American Century; Wikipedia
Charlie Chaplin exclaimed in his 1940 film, The Great Dictator, that dictators come and go, and those brutes lie and free themselves while enslaving the people. Ensconced in greed, brutes disallow reason and science and progress that could unconceal all peoples’ happiness. I often wonder how Mr. Chaplin, again as actor and producer, might imagine 21st century fascism.
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