With evolution there are eras where the next version of the species overlaps the first.  Consider yourself privileged, since you are going to witness the transition.

Whether you are going to be the new digital homo sapien or legacy organic version is something you will know when you are faced with the final decision to unplug yourself from the 3 dimensional machine you call your body.

For thousands of years we have contemplated where “we” are; where the soul lives.  Today, we are peering into pandora’s box and ready to jump in.

For those of you who can’t wrap your minds around the last 4 paragraphs and extend your vision to where this is going to lead, you need not read any further.  It’s just another one of the drops in the vast ocean of signs that have led mankind to this very point.

Today we are open to the idea of connecting with each other in a digital cartoon form from our living rooms.

Resolution will increase.  Sensory inputs will develop.  Biofeedback will advance, and eventually cerebral integration will become a thing of reality.

At this point in the timeline, talking about these things to most of you seems like science fiction, but remember that  only 50 years ago if you mentioned to a person of relatively advanced intelligence that 5o years from now most of the civilized world will have 3 x 5 sheets of glass in their pockets that will connect to a worldwide reservoir of knowledge and information, transmit video phone calls, control your home, and vertically integrate into medicine, retail, and banking; they would think that you had lost your mind.

Today in most major cities, the average person carries a smart phone.  The beginnings of a new species of human being has taken root.  I’ve talked about this person before… welcome homo technologicus.

Please save your dissertation of anthropology and sociology for the classroom.  The reality is that people are changing because of technology.  That is a matter that neither anthropology or sociology are not ready for.  In fact they have both been caught with their pants down as technology has run onto the scene with a relentless sense of urgency to eviscerate most of our scientific disciplines.

The human brain has been freed from the tedious tasks that science once imposed on it, to a more creative role.  We ask the questions now and use technology to collect, calculate, render and cross section our data.

Technology not shapes our environment, our genes, our food production and every other facet of our lives.  Technology compares to Darwinian evolutionary theory, as Einstein’s relatively compares to Newtonian physics.  These discussions are contained on an entirely different plane.

Today, we will Kinect.  Tomorrow WE will be the avatar in the box.

Why not?

What kept us from coming this far?  You can’t deny that a part of you thinks it’s strange to “connect” with other people via your TV and a cartoon avatar.  Even video chat isn’t the same as an in person conversation.  We all agree on this.  But that only proves our already outdated ideology.  Just like the kids of 1910 are having a hard time wrapping their minds around the social networking craze of the new generation, or digital music… they have gotten old, as those of us who have a hard time accepting the avatar world have.

The word avatar is interesting.  In Hinduism, Avatar or Avatāra (Devanagari Sanskrit for “descent from heaven to earth”) refers to a deliberate descent of a deity (an incarnation of a deva (God) from heaven to earth, or a descent of the Supreme Being (i.e., Vishnu for Vaishnavites) and is mostly translated into English as “incarnation”, but more accurately as “appearance” or “manifestation”.

So in essence the basic concept of almost every major religion.  A soul descends to the lower dimensional plane of the 3rd dimension and occupies the body.

This is a beautiful thing, since you are actually the avatar of the soul.

But here is my warning to the rest of humanity and the future.  This “thing” that is happening with technology around us will continue to evolve, and you will be faced with a decision at one point in time.  That decision will be to leave the body and live in the machine.

This decision will be very tempting indeed.  Think of the possibility of eternal life, without pain, without hunger.  Just pure consciousness beamed across the universe at the speed of light form one machine to another.  You can experience the entire universe and all the splendors it holds, and watch the ending, or remaking of it.

But just as the very definition of avatar implies, you are a in a lessor dimension.  From the 3rd dimension to the 2nd.  Experiencing the world in binary.  Music, Art and love will instantly disappear.

The final conclusion to this long story of the soul of the hairless ape will come to an end.  Those who enter the 2nd dimensional prison for ever, and those who are content with their temporary 3rd dimensional lease, not knowing what lies ahead, but willing to surrender their material being to the amalgamated energy of the universe… to go on forever, but free.

I claim no knowledge of where the soul resides.  I don’t know what lies ahead for us when we die.  I don’t have an answer for the mystical nature of what makes us human and how we create the concept of a God.  But I do know, as a  lover science, as many great scientists in the past have concluded, that these discussions cannot be answered with the tools that are bound to this 3rd dimension of ours.

Today we stand on the edge of an abyss that will take us into a new frontier.  One that I think we are ill prepared for.  At a time where we have much unfinished business in our third dimensional lives, we are going to escape into the second.  I argue that this is irresponsible.

We put so much effort into entering the avatar world, yet we still have human beings suffering in the world.  We wait in line for our next best smart phone, but we tolerate injustice in the name of religion.  We pay thousands of dollars every year for entertainment (cable TV, game boxes, internet service) yet we can’t share our financial resources to better life on our planet, for our species, or our fellow earthlings.

Welcome to the final chapter of homo sapien sapien.  Homo technologicus has arrived.

If you understand the message, spread the word.

i live by a freeway.

i’ve written a lot of intense and raw thoughts about our inter-relationship of this project that came out of no where.  the ultimate spaceship has become a unique place in the artificial world we call the internet.

i hope with this essay, i can share one more interesting observation i recently made about the world around us and how we perceive and interact with it.  forewarning: it’s 1923 words… not for the meek; if you can’t make the time, you don’t need to delve into this topic.

the question has constantly been there in most of your heads when you read essays like ones posted on this site… “so what are we supposed to do, move to caves and live in nature like animals?”

no.

we are homo sapien sapien.  this is our gift.  we are the privileged species on this rock.

we are the ones who carried the tortures of evolution on our shoulders like every other species competing with us on this planet we call earth, and developed a remarkable skill that they didn’t.

it’s called technology.

technology allowed us to do a remarkable thing.  for a limited amount of time, we have been given access to living without competing in the food chain, sometimes referred to as the tree of life.

given that the macro pressures of life, that is air and water will soon exert themselves on us, we can control one of the holy parts of the trinity of life for carbon based organisms like us… food.

although we currently divert water to provide fresh water to arid areas we choose to populate, water will be the next challenge for homo sapien given our insatiable appetite to grow, I still refer to it as a factor we cannot control because mass desalination to sustain our current population is not a technology we have developed, refined and made readily available yet.

the production of oxygen is also something that we depend on out trusty friends, the plants to do; as they do, ever so diligently… every day.

so food is the one thing we have a grip on. instead of fending for ourselves and taking another animals life with our own claws, or our own teeth, we developed tools to kill flesh and take in the calories.  this same technology soon gave rise to our ability to understand the life cycle of a seed to plant, and cultivate the gift our planet has given us…

we quickly sectioned off pieces of what was once free flowing land, to give rise to another technologic revolution… agriculture.

with our first technologic boom came primitive level of advancement.  the tools that arose from this revolution were simple.  chipped pieces of rock to form sharp edges to kill.

the agricultural revolution (probably single most important revolution in our history) gave rise to more complex tools.  sharp devices to cut the land and sew our seeds, and harvest the bounty of the earth.

as our technologic discoveries ‘expressed’ themselves in our surroundings and made themselves at home in our routines, our big brains did something remarkable.  they didn’t stop like the brains of our close cousins chimpanzees do when they modify stems to harvest termites from their hills.

we kept improving on our technology.

this is what makes you human.

you have the innate ability to look at a problem, and puts things together to solve it.

you have the ability to imagine something, and use your hands to make it.  given the technology that your ancestors created before you; your creative ability increases exponentially.

sharp rocks gave rise to hunting, which eventually gave rise to agriculture, which in turn gave rise to cities, which resulted in cars, which led up to computers, which took us to another planet… our moon.  and now, maybe even beyond.

isn’t that just remarkable.

you should be proud to be chosen as one of the privileged members of this truly beautiful and grand species.

but with great power comes great responsibility.

it is now time for me to pose my observation.

dogs evolved parasitically on us.  even though we feed them, and work to pay for electricity to keep them warm with us at night in our modern, nature proof dwellings, dogs parasitically feed on us.

as a species they have capitalized on a evolutionary beneficial relationship which provides their species with the ability to not have to hunt for food.

before the first “more friendly” wolves were taken in by early humans, we had to fight other animals on our own.  but when we began to observe that a few wolves (one our natural predators) were a little more friendly, and not as instinctually predatory, we were drawn into, what appeared at the time, the mystical an sacred relationship of wolf and man.

but in reality this friendship was really a means that a subspecies of wolf emerged that doesn’t have to fend for itself anymore in the wild and turbulent world of nature.  in return we we able to “domesticate” a well bred machine for fighting off and killing other predatory species.  our early dogs provided their “new pack” the security we needed from other animals (as well as each other… take tribalism for instance).

this process is fascinating and is not an original idea or observation by me.  rather it is my attempt to summarize a series of papers and texts i have recently come across.

i warn you in advance, from here on it gets a little bumpy and bizarre.

technology is another organism, feeding on our big brains.  feeding on our fears.  evolving on the backs of our labors.

look around you.  look at how many things you take for granted that give you life, yet are based on technology.

clean water.
heat.
shelter.
food.
clothing.
shoes.
medicine.
communications.
education.
transportation.

all of it.

in fact, please allow me to extent myself by claiming that i really don’t care who you are and where you are reading this essay… if you are reading it, your entire existence is here because of technology.

we depend on it like a drug to stay alive,  just like dogs depend on their owners to stay alive.

but the message in our dog discussion is that it is the owner who is really the “dog”, who is really the slave.  the dog has evolved on our backs to make us it’s slave.

technology, the “super” organism is evolving on our backs, to make us it’s slave.

we check our watches without thinking what happened that we decided to fragment time into hours, and minutes, and seconds?

we get into our cars to drive a few miles to pick up something to eat (which is ready at any hour now) without thinking that it’s a fraction of what our ancestors walked to get water.

technology is this irresistible drug that has latched on to homo sapien and will soon make us it’s slave.

i postulate this because i watch “us” drive by everyday on the freeway.

and if you just step away for a second and look at the freeway, really look at it, you see and amorphous ocean of metal cells…

moving little organic nuclei around the “city” to do their respective jobs…

just like the silent workers in your arteries, the red blood cells…

the “human-car” cells move along the massive arteries of technology, freeways…

to do their jobs at their destinations, and return home to get replenished, only to go back for another round the next day.

red blood cells.  get oxygen in the lungs, deliver it to the cells; go back to the lungs, and do it all over again.

all this to keep the “super-organism” alive.  in your case, it would be you.  your body, your brain, and everything else that makes up what you identify as “you”.

but does a red blood cell know you exist?  and how many red blood cells come and go before you die?

such is our relationship with this slow growing “super-organism” we call technology.

the final stage of this act however isn’t as rosie as the evolutionary version.

you see, despite her cruel and unusual model of sustainability, nature is actually timid to what possibly awaits us.

intellectuals have pondered what could happen when we continue with our unstoppable desire to create intelligent machines.  the question has been contemplated since the beginning of modern technology… “will machines take over?”

in a way, they already have.  they just haven’t developed an identity yet to come out and say “hello human, how are you today?  i’m fine thank you.”

but that’s only a matter of time.  you can rest easy knowing that there are teams of big brains working for technology, helping it develop this crucial part of continued existence.  just like we checked out of the food chain by discovering the tool and fire, technology will check out of earth and travel the universe.

imagine machines that could repair themselves, don’t depend on oxygen and are powered by the sun… but have intelligence.  they don’t even need consciousness.  one can argue that a cockroach doesn’t have the level of consciousness a human does, yet it strives to survive, at all costs.

wouldn’t that be true for a simple intelligent machine with a program to survive?  this is a prototype, but it’s here, right now…

so what do we do?  i don’t know.

was the mark of the beast our ancestors warned us of in their cryptic and almost fictional parables and holy books referring to technology.  if that’s the case then it might be too late, because almost every human carries a mobile phone.  i spent a month in the remote desolate lands of africa and i saw maasi tribesmen who live in dung huts carrying cell phones.

i came home tonight after seeing the film 127 hours.  i won’t spoil the film for you, but I highly recommend you watch this compelling journey into a mans will to survive and his journey to the inner mind during this moment of truth.

the part that stuck with me was that he is still alive because of technology.  water in a bottle and food wrapped in packaging kept him alive a few more days than he could have lived without it.  and in the ultimate example of irony, he used a multi-tool made by machines to cut his hand off so he had a chance to survive.

once again, technology saved us, even it is by cutting off our hand.

what part of our bodies will we give up next to keep living?  as abstract as it sounds, if we live long enough, this might be a question we might have to answer.

would you “upgrade” your legs to faster, longer lasting robotic ones?  would you replace your eyes for zoom lens, UV and infra-red digital ones?

i know, that’s a little too sci-fi for you… how ‘bout this, would you replace your heart with an advanced mechanical one if you were going to dei from heart failure?

it starts somewhere, but once it does, it’s unstoppable.

thank you for reading.

be kind to your planet.

you’re a member of a very special and rare product of nature.  a species that appreciates art, music, mixing foods, learning the truth behind mysticism, and the most special characteristic of human being…

enjoyment.

For the past few years, I’ve been spending a lot of time on college campuses, discussing the ethics of eating animals with college debate teams; I argue that vegetarianism is an ethical imperative for all members of the student body, and my adversaries (two members of the school’s debate team) argue that it’s not.

Last year, I visited Harvard, Yale, BYU, the Universities of Texas, Georgia, and Florida — and dozens of other schools, coast to coast. This fall, I’m slated to visit Cornell, Princeton, Boston College, the University of Minnesota, and half a dozen additional schools.

The topic is a hot one on college campuses, and the teams that have accepted have been rewarded by what they have consistently told us to be their largest event audiences ever. You can watch many of the debates online, if you’re so inclined, but here is the crux of my argument:

First, eating meat wastes and pollutes our land, water and air–as I discuss more thoroughly here. Second, eating meat drives up the price of cereals, which leads to starvation and food riots – as I discuss here. Finally, eating meat supports cruelty to animals so severe that it would warrant felony cruelty charges were dogs or cats so horribly abused — and that’s true even of so-called “humane” farms (video).

Cruelty to animals is where I focus in these debates, because it’s the issue that is most obvious: We are a nation of animal lovers — according to a Gallup Poll last May, fully 97 percent of us support laws to protect animals from abuse — and yet the animals with whom we come into contact most frequently are the animals we pay other people to abuse and kill for us.

The arguments that seem to resonate with students most deeply are:

First, other animals are made of flesh, blood, and bone — just like humans. They have the same five physiological senses (i.e., they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch) that we do. And they feel pain — again, just like we do. At most colleges and universities, students are unanimously opposed to eating dogs or cats; the idea revolts them. Yet there is no ethical difference between eating a dog, cat, chicken, pig or fish. If anything, eating your dogs or cats would be morally preferable, since they would have led a good life until you killed them.

In fact, both pigs and chickens do better on cognition tests than dogs or cats. Chickens can navigate mazes, learn from television and have both a capacity for forethought and meta-cognition. Pigs dream, recognize their names, play video games far more effectively than even some primates, and lead social lives of a complexity previously observed exclusively among primates.

Dr. Richard Dawkins, the foremost living evolutionary biologist, calls other species our evolutionary “cousins” and denounces what he calls “speciesist arrogance” — the idea that we are better than, and can do whatever we want to other species. Darwin taught us that other species are more like us than they’re unlike us. Eating meat entails eating “someone,” not “something.” Eating meat entails eating bits from an animal’s corpse. That’s not hyperbole; it’s reality. That’s not sentimental; it’s a fact. Don’t want to eat corpses? Don’t eat meat.

Second, if we’re eating meat, we are paying people to abuse animals in myriad ways that would violate anti-cruelty laws if these were dogs or cats rather than chickens and pigs. Animals are deprived of everything that is natural and important to them; they never breathe fresh air, raise their young, develop normal relationships with other animals, explore their surroundings, or do anything else they would do in nature. Artificial breeding practices are used so that animals will grow far more quickly than they would naturally, and their organs and limbs simply can’t keep up. For example, chickens’ upper bodies grow seven times as quickly as they did just 30 years ago, so these factory-farmed animals who live for fewer than two months (they’re still chirping like infants when they’re sent to slaughter) suffer from lung collapse, heart failure, and crippling leg deformities.

Michael Specter, a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker , visited a chicken farm and wrote, “I was almost knocked to the ground by the overpowering smell of feces and ammonia. My eyes burned and so did my lungs, and I could neither see nor breathe… There must have been 30,000 chickens sitting silently on the floor in front of me. They didn’t move, didn’t cluck. They were almost like statues of chickens, living in nearly total darkness, and they would spend every minute of their six-week lives that way.”

Similarly hideous conditions exist for all animals raised for food; rather than further detailing the horrid details, I will ask that you if you eat meat, you watch “Meet Your Meat,” which is narrated by Alec Baldwin, and “Glass Walls,” which is narrated by Sir Paul McCartney — I generally show the opening two minutes of Meet Your Meat as a part of my 10 minute opening statement in college debates. Both videos offer a gruesome window into what we’re supporting if we choose to eat chickens, pigs and other farmed animals. If we eat meat, we should at least ensure that we know what we’re paying for.

If you would not personally slice a chicken’s beak off, or castrate a pig without pain relief or slice open an animal’s throat, why pay someone else to do it for you? Where is the basic integrity in entering into this mercenary relationship? Is the person who hires someone to do something less culpable than the one who carries out the action? Of course not. Eating meat involves paying people to do things for us that most of us would not do ourselves. Where’s the basic integrity — the consistency — in such a relationship?

Or, put in a more affirmative way: Vegetarianism allows me to live my values — to “pray ceaselessly,” as St. Paul puts it: Every time I sit down to eat, I cast my lot: for mercy, against misery; for the oppressed, against the oppressor; and for compassion, against cruelty. There is a lot of suffering in the world, but how much suffering can be addressed with literally no time or effort on our part? We can just stop supporting it, by making different choices.

So what’s the trade-off: Why do people eat meat? And are the reasons we eat meat — the benefits — worth the costs?

Well, we get a few moments of pleasure — most of us like the taste. We have more options at the grocery store and at restaurants. We can eat over at a friend’s house without having to bring a dish. We never have to explain our dietary choices…

Is that really it? That it’s convenient? That it’s easier?

Although I don’t discuss this on university campuses, where everyone knows plenty of healthy vegans and thus knows they don’t need meat to survive, I should take a moment to point out that meat is absolutely not good for us. The American Dietetic Association — the largest body of nutrition professionals on the planet — conducted a meta-analysis of all the studies that have ever been done on diet and disease, and found that vegetarians have lower rates of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer and obesity than meat-eaters (they believe that the studies indicate causality, not just correlation). Their position paper on vegetarian and vegan diets concludes that vegetarian and vegan diets are appropriate for all people and during all stages of life, including infancy and pregnancy.

So add it all up: Eating meat wastes and pollutes our natural resources — requiring many times the water, land and energy of eating plants (a moral imperative on its own). Eating meat requires about 1 billion metric tons of grain, corn, and soy — fed to the animals, who burn most of that energy off, which drives up the price of food for people who are starving (another moral imperative, on its own). And eating meat involves paying other people to do a wide variety of things to animals in ways that most of us would never do ourselves.

Put another way: If we believe that people should try to protect the environment, OR we believe that we should try not to cause people to starve OR we oppose cruelty to animals, the only ethical diet is a vegetarian one.

I have the pleasure of hearing an author whom I respect highly speak at an inter-faith environmental movement at a church in downtown Los Angeles.  At this event, Bill McKibben spoke about the integral role that religion plays in acting in an environmental manner.  I agree.

During the talks, there were references to the “crimes against creation” and local leaders from each religion were present to offer the perspective of their respective faiths and how they have environmentalism built into each religion.

I observed something very interesting.  Each religion held true to it’s outwardly perceived image.  What is relevant about this observation is that the most truly environmental faith (in my opinion) presented it’s position with the most abstract and disconnected rhetoric available.  In fact, every faith leader used language that really, doesn’t mean much in the real world to represent their ideals.

And that is the problem.  When we talk about your thoughts creating reality and your ideas manifesting your life, the problem is that most people will drift off into la la land and “hope” or try to “imagine” their beautiful world of goodness and health.

There is an ancient Persian phrase that originated in the Zoroastrian faith (one of the first religions that molded what most modern religions are based on) provides humanity with this simple little instruction guide to the quantum world:

“Pendar Nik , Goftar Nik , Kerdar Nik”

Translated into English this phrase means:

“Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds”

Simple right.  It’s not enough to have good thoughts.  You have to use good words, and do good deeds.  Then you can manifest your reality.

I find it ironic that over the course of only 4000 years we were able to derail ourselves from this fool proof premise.  Once again, I refuse to accept that it is human nature to do this.

Some of the images you see in the video above are simply grotesque, yet I argue that every one of those is a result of a human being failing to be a real human being.

To be human is to think.  To think is to understand logic.  To understand logic is to look at one self and evaluate the possible outcome of one’s behavior or decision making.

In a world with such chaos, it is obvious that we are not thinking.  We are not being human.

Once again, it comes back to taking responsibility and being present.  What the wise Zoroastrians tried to capture in their 3 sided phrase of divinity.  Good Thoughts.  Good Words.  Good Deeds

This video was sent to me by a friend who is brilliant.  But what saddens me is that such a powerful message, and powerful imagery is diluted to prayer and hope.  Once again, we live in our heads and refuse to carry on our duty to follow the last two steps of the easy to use instruction manual left behind by our wise elders.

We create with our thoughts, our words, and our deeds.

What if praying and accepting armageddon is what is going to manifest it?  Have you ever thought about what you choose to believe and what you are creating by believing it?

For me, the most difficult part of the process is the observation.  I do not mean the physical act of observing.  I mean watching the degradation and demoralization of society, that at its best is heartbreaking.

Yes, there are pockets of wonderful things: watching people in love, seeing children laughing, finding days old ducklings in the LA River.  There are momentary glances at bliss that carry me through the day.  Because more often than not, I am watching the worst of humanity.  This seems to be much more the norm nowadays.

There are two things that happened this week that has helped me understand the downward trend in humanity.  I wanted to share these, if you, like me, want to find reasons for why attitudes toward one another seem to have shifted so dramatically.

The first was a simple observation, which I think led into my latest theory.

I live in Los Angeles.  If you don’t live here… and I don’t think it matters because I think it has become an epidemic.. the people who migrate into LA are for the most part desiring a career in the entertainment industry.  Their focus in life is to be the center of attention, to look as a certain image or character, and to be in the right place to get discovered.  to summarize simply, they want to be seen.

As I drove through Beverly Hills the other day, the mecca for wanting to be a part of it all, it occurred to me…. if everyone’s sole purpose in this town is to be seen, then it means we have a city of people who think they’re invisible.

I sat with that notion for a while… what does it mean if we live in a city, state, country, where people feel so insignificant that they do whatever they can to be seen?  I likened it to a child who needs attention… they act out, the throw tantrums, they hurt another… all for the chance to be seen by an authority.

The second thing isn’t an event that happened.  It was an opening of my mind to an idea that may be the answer to why things have gotten the way they have gotten.

Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs (Click to zoom)

Have you ever heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?

Proposed by Abraham Maslow in 1943, his theory is that there are inherent needs that an individual has to have met, in order to survive, have fulfillment and be psychologically advanced.  As pictured, it is most often depicted as a pyramid.  The base is physiological needs, like food, water, and oxygen.  The other levels include Safety, Love and Belonging, Esteem, and Self Actualization.  In order for an individual to move up the pyramid to higher levels, all requirements must be met at the base levels.  For example, you might not care so much about finding love, if you can’t breath.  (Extreme example, I know.)

A few nights ago, I was in an in depth conversation about what needs to happen to get people to start changing their habits.  For example, what can be done to get people to stop grabbing for a plastic water bottle, and instead have a connection to the harm that bottle does to our health and environment.  Or, everyone is mad at BP, but not enough to stop driving their cars.  As it often occurs, the conversation was dynamic and built upon topic after topic, and I can’t tell you what provoked this, but I was struck with the idea of looking up Maslow’s theory. I thought there might be a clue to human nature.

My opinion is that I found a possible reason to why society is struggling with doing the right thing.

So, remember that in order to move up through the pyramid to the pinnacle, self-actualization, all the other needs must be met.  And, I ask you to go back to my other observation in the week about realizing that everyone wants to be seen because everyone, psychologically, thinks they are invisible.  If you put it all together, I think you will see and understand what is going on in our communities that if fixed could change the world.

I propose that the reason our society isn’t moving in a direction of morality and ethics is because we simply are trapped in the lower levels of the hierarchy of needs, which makes us physically and psychologically unable to move to the next level.  In fact, I think many people are toggling between Safety and Love/Belonging and cannot get out of the vicious circle that has been created for us.

I also believe that who is to blame is media and entertainment.  I know it has been talked about before on this site, so I will try to be brief.  However, if you are constantly exposing yourself to television, films and print media and the illusion they create about where you “should” be in life, an unrealistic reality, you will always feel dissatisfied and you will always be working towards an unattainable goal.  For example, if you watch a sitcom with a family in which the set is designed so that their house is large, they have a nice car, the latest appliances, new clothes, their children are getting a private school education and they are all doing it, as the script defines, on the average American salary, then you as the viewer will feel devalued because you don’t have the big house, the new clothes, the fancy car, etc., on your true and realistic average income.

The point of a story, whether it be drama or comedy, is to have extreme highs and lows so that the viewer is entertained and finds value in what is being presented to them.  The flaw in this is that we look at our own lives, see that we don’t have extreme tragedies or extraordinary wins, and think that we somehow have failed.  When in reality, most people live a very fluid, one note kind of life.  This isn’t a bad thing… this is how it is supposed to be.  Living a dramatic life is not the norm.

Given all of this, I think we have become trapped in the level of constantly seeking love and belonging.  Whatever story line you can think of, if it isn’t happening to you, since it is that drama that you see everyday, we make the decision that we are just not good enough.

My wife didn’t surprise me at Christmas with the Lexus with the big red bow.  I must need to do better to deserve it.  My boyfriend hasn’t proposed after being together for two years with a 5 carat, princess cut, canary yellow diamond.  I must be unlovable.

The reality is that what is on television, what you read in fiction, what is being told in movies and what is being sung about is simply not the truth.

So what?

Well, if you are constantly looking for love and belonging, not getting, but are told that it comes in material forms, you bring yourself down to the next level.  You stay stuck between safety (this is where unemployment, property and resources fall) and love and belonging (the search for a connection with another).

When you pass these levels you move through Esteem, where you feel comfortable with yourself and have respect towards others, and then can move to the highest level, Self Actualization, which is where morality and lack of prejudice reside.

The other quality of self-actualization is problem solving.  So, if we had masses of individuals that were ethical, moral, and lacking prejudice, we would also reside in a world that can solve problems and be creative and respect one another in the process.

But we reside in the world that we are still looking for love, desperate to not be invisible anymore.  A world where we are not trapped by corporate greed training us to spend more and more money and thinking only of ourselves. I would gather that if we had confidence and trusted that we are enough, that we are worthy, we would move into a world that was sustainable to the human existence.

s5

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy, The Age of Missing Information and is the pioneer behind the 350.org movement. His latest book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

If you haven’t read any of Mr. McKibben’s work, I urge you to start.  His style and thoughts are original, and are a welcome and refreshing perspective on an ailing world that isn’t learning from it’s past mistakes and careening like a locomotive heading for a broken bridge.

Thank you Bill for a truly remarkable essay.

The Mental Environment

Where our fate as humans will be decided.

by Bill McKibben

Your mind, a clear mountain stream running burbling through the rocks. Until Pepsi stands up, unzips its billion-dollar ad budget, and takes a leak, staining it forever brown. Your brain, a verdant old-growth forest, until it dies the death of a thousand swooshes. Your soul, filled with the crystal fresh air of early morning, until Philip Morris blows in a cloud of its seductive smoke.

No. Mental environmentalism may be the most important notion of this new century, but the only way to start this discussion is by admitting the analogy is not exact. Whatever the mental environment is, it’s not a pristine wilderness untrammeled by people. It’s not the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the Antarctic biosphere. No, the mental environment has been shaped by culture as long as we’ve been, well, human.

The mind is, among other things, a tool for collecting, storing, weighing images and ideas. Perhaps earlier in our primate evolution our brains worked differently, but for millions of years we have been shaping our own minds and the minds of those around us. Our mental environment is not the Yosemite of John Muir or Ansel Adams. It has always been more like Central Park, a landscaped reflection of human notions. Every generation, every community, has had a mental environment. The culture. The zeitgeist. It is that almost invisible fog of assumptions in which we live our lives, the set of images and ideas we barely notice because they are so common as to be both banal and overwhelming.

What’s more, this is not the first moment that our mental environment has been polluted. We’ve seen all kinds of toxins poured into the infostream. Check out a Leni Riefenstahl movie if you want to see what I mean. Try to imagine life during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. The state, the church have time and again become mentally oppressive until eventually a resistance emerged — a resistance that, from Martin Luther to Vaclav Havel, said at least in part: “We want our minds back.” Not all the way back: We’ve never owned our minds entirely. But more of our minds, in better shape.

Which brings us to the present moment, the moment that we have to deal with, the moment out of which we have to stage our singular resistance. The mental environment is under siege from a particularly difficult variety of pollution. To understand it, consider an analogy from the physical world, where carbon dioxide is threatening to warm the planet disastrously. Taken in small doses, carbon dioxide is not dangerous, just as the occasional commercial or billboard is hardly a problem. In fact, CO2 in small quantities isn’t anywhere near as dangerous as most chemicals, just as Ronald McDonald couldn’t do the same kind of damage as, say, Joseph Goebbels. But every act of a modern life releases carbon into the atmosphere. Spewed from the rear ends of a billion cars and factories and furnaces, this constant pollution now seems likely to raise global temperatures five degrees in this century, altering everything from rainfall to ice-melt to wind speed. Similarly, the modern consumer economy sends up an almost infinite blitz of information and enticement, till the air is so thick with it that every feature of our society is changed. In neither case is it pollution in the usual sense, easily cleaned with a smokestack filter or combated with a more wholesome image. Instead, it’s a volume problem. In the case of the so-called information society, it may be the largest psychological experiment in history.

Here’s another way of saying it: We are the first few generations to receive most of our sense of the world mediated rather than direct, to have it arrive through one screen or another instead of from contact with other human beings or with nature.

If the mental environment we live in has a single distinctive feature, the way that oxygen defines our atmosphere, it is self-absorption. That’s what a mental environment gone awry has produced; that is the toxic outcome of our era’s unique pollution. Some years ago, working on a book, I watched every word and image that came across the largest cable system in the world in a 24-hour period — more than 2,000 hours of ads and infomercials, music videos and sitcoms. If you boiled this stew down to its basic ingredient, this is what you found, repeated ad infinitum: You are the most important thing on Earth, the heaviest object in the universe. From the fawning flattery of the programming to the mind-messing nastiness of the commercials, it continually posited a world of extreme individualism. Even more than, say, violence, that’s the message that flows out the coaxial cable. Characters on television may turn violent to get what they want now, but it’s the what-they-want-now that lies nearer the heart of the problem.

This hyperindividualism is a relatively new phenomenon in our lives. For most of human history, people have put something else near the center — the tribe, the gods, the natural world. But a consumer society can’t tolerate that, because having something else at the center complicates consumption.

This appeal to us as individual fragments grows ever more powerful and precise. Most of the new technologies premise their appeal (especially to advertisers) on their ability to target with frightening accuracy our locations and our psyches.

So far, the assaults on our mental environment have been mainly from the outside, but we are seeing sorties on the inside too. Already we see psychopharmacology rampant, the ranks of people who need such medicine swelled by a creeping malaise: a gradual redefinition of our foibles, of our tiny personal tragedies. There are pills for the camera-shy, for “shopper’s remorse,” for the stresses of personal bankruptcy — it’s getting crowded in the collective bummer tent. Before long, genetic engineers may well be able to literally tweak the brains of our children, offering them “extra intelligence” or perhaps docility, upgraded memory at the price of downgraded meaning. Improved individuals, at the price of whatever individuality should mean in its sweetest sense.

But. The human mind and heart are not dead yet; indeed there are signs that we’ve reached the moment of resistance, that a million Vaclav Havels, albeit often tongue-tied and unsure precisely of their mission, are rising from different corners to challenge this assault. If you ask me what I remember from the WTO battle in Seattle, it is not the sting of rubber bullets or the choke of gas; it is a jaunty balloon rising above the melee with this message painted on its side: “Wake Up Muggles.” If you’ve read Harry Potter, then you know: Muggles are all of us, living in a world of magic but unable to see it, focused as we are on television and mall. But we are waking, in sufficient numbers to ensure there will be the same kind of fight for the mental environment as there has been for the physical one. And, of course, the fights will overlap.

Mental environmentalists may well lose, just like their colleagues working in the physical world. Global warming may be too much to overcome, and so may genetic engineering or push media or the simple warm-bath skill of those designers and marketers who would sap our lives for their own advancement. But the fight itself holds tremendous possibility. The liberation from self-absorption comes most of all in the battle to help others and in the vision of a world that makes sense to our minds, a world where no single idea (“buy”) holds sway.

Forget monoculture, in our fields or in our heads; imagine instead a thousand different communities, adapted to the physical places they inhabit, sharing insight and difference, appreciating small scale and large heart. Where no musician sells 10 million copies, but 10 million musicians sing each night. Where we are freed from consumer identity and idolatry to be much more ourselves. Where we have our heads back.

Thoughts on the video…

“Eating dead flesh”, by s3

When we wake up for the first time, we cry.  It’s almost agonizing the sound of entering the world, a plea for help… because we are indeed born helpless.

Waking up for the second time is no different.  Many of you read this site for amusement, or a glimmer to truth in this harsh world of untruth.

But as it has been since the beginning, I only wish for you to wake up.  I want to assure you of what you will feel when you open your eyes to the truth.  The truth, truth.  You will cry.  You will shrill like you did when you entered this world, for help.

Help because what you will see will be so uncomfortably different than what you have lived to believe, that indeed, you are helpless.

Eating another animal that is treated this way, is no different than eating our own flesh.  It is participating and allowing for the continued barbaric treatment of our fellow Earthlings, the species that are privileged like ours, to experience the miracle of living.

The food chain is a truth of nature, but in no part of it does this kind of abuse, and humiliation of another life form exist.  Every species on this planet, kills it’s prey with the least amount of suffering possible, except for Homo Sapien Sapien.

We enjoy to make these martyrs of the food chain suffer.  We love it so much, we collectively agree to turn our backs as it happens every day.  We go to our markets and buy our cleanly cut, butchered flesh in packaging that is so far from it’s original hairy, smelly form and celebrate in our marvelous accomplishment of enslaving an entire species for not only our own nourishment, but to serve as an outlet of our violent tendencies.

I wonder if intelligent life did arrive out our little blue planet, and did enslave us to rape us of our resources, would we all finally open our eyes and realize factory farming is the ultimate decay of human existence?

“One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;” and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”  Henry David Thoreau

“I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it.”  Mahatma Gandhi

“Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals.”  Theodor Adorno

“As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”  Leo Tolstoy

“Who is the Devil?”, by s5

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.  ~William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922

Last week, a video was released by Mercy for Animals of horrific animal abuse happening at a dairy farm in Ohio.

In the two days since it has been released many are calling it the worst video of animal abuse ever recorded.  Calves are tortured with tire irons and pitch forks, their tails are cut off with anesthesia and they are beaten by the employees with such violence it is horrifying.

In Ohio, the abuse of an animal is considered a misdemeanor.  The men who are responsible for this will walk away with barely a snap of the wrist.

Why should you care?

For one thing, it is an empirical fact that the presence of factory farms and slaughterhouses increase the violent crimes that happen in the surrounding areas.  If you care about your community and the safety of your family, then you want to care about the presence of such facilities in your city.  When the men and women who work in this facility witness abject abuses towards animals, they internalize it and over time lose their sense of compassion towards every living being.  These facilities employ honest people looking for a way to provide for their families, and turn them in psychopaths.  (And, no, I do not believe in any regard that I am over exaggerating and I can link to study after study that confirms my point.)

The simple truth is that if you have complaints about your community (increases in violence, increases in immigration, increases in sickness) then you need to look to the meat industry and demand change.

But it is so much more than that and yet sometimes so hard to put into words.  The reason you are able to eat the meat that you do is because you protect yourself by not admitting the truth.  But you cannot protect yourself from the reality of this any longer.

I talk to so many people that care about the environment.  The oil spill is horrendous.  The fact that our rainforest is being depleted at alarming rates is tragic.  The truth that we are running out of water is frightening.  Everyone is so full of anger and yet we are so inert about it all.

But the truth is that you created the oil spill.  You participate in the cutting down of hundred year old trees.  You are the reason we are running out of water.  Put simply, you drive a car, and you buy clothes, and you eat meat at such alarming rates that factory farms have to exist in the first place.  The number one contribution to fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas release and dead zones in our ocean is because of this insatiable desire that you have for flesh.  The only reason we are drilling in the first place, that creates the environment for a disaster to occur, is because the infrastructure that you find comforting has to keep running.

So, the reason it is okay for a baby calf to be tortured and writhing in pain while its mother looks on with grief in her eyes… is because you don’t stop buying it at the super market.

So when you see this video, the person you should be mad at is the person looking back at you in the mirror.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.  He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits.  Yet he is lord of all the animals.  ~George Orwell, Animal Farm

If you drink bottled water, take a step back, look at yourself in the mirror, and realize that you are part of the problem.

I’m at LAX. Massive public arena. My tax dollars support this place.
Yet, there isn’t a single water fountain in sight. Not one. Nowhere.
Zilch. NOTHING! So I walk into the store (as the private businesses
planned for me to do) and I pay $5 for 500 ml of Fiji water. $5 for
water! So I am drinking my water and cursing this disgusting system
and I read the back of my bottle and it says “Fiji water is committed
to reducing carbon in the atmosphere please visit www.fijigreen.com”

Are you fucking kidding me! You pouring water into a plastic bottle
and flying it half way across the world? And you are committed to
reducing carbon? And you have a pretty green logo so that’s supposed
to make me feel good. FUCK YOU!

Please put me on a ship to Mars. Where do I sign up?

Read it on your own merit and see what you think.  Creative writing by a very enigmatic author indeed.  I recommend after reading the essay you do some research on the Queen of England and read about Barabbas.  Here is what Wikipedia says about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabbas

Even though we like to think we’re free thinkers and science rules our world… imagine science to the Nth degree.  What would an iPhone seem like to a person who lived in the 16th century?

Peter Nguyen
Mr. LeBlanc
May 29, 2000
Religion

The Stations of the Cross Report

Jesus died on Good Friday, so that we could all inherit eternal life.  It’s noted in the Bible that jesus was not murdered, but died of his own free will.  He know he was to die in order for all of mankind to escape a grisly end.  It is part of the mystery of Jesus being that he was able to be both God and man, and understand what was to happen and why he had to do it.  It of course was no difficult task for Jesus, because he was not only our savior, but he was also a heroic Time Traveler from the future.

Jesus came from a bleak and dismal future ruled by dragons and gigantic whore on the backs of animals (Revelations).  In order for him to save our time, he had to back to the past to prevent Judgement day from happening.  To do so, he needed to return to the past and warn everyone.  He went and impregnated his DNA in the womb of a young woman in the form of an Angel, and was born.  When his past self became of age, we would constantly visit and warn Past Jesus of all his enemies, and helped Past Jesus heal the sick by giving him medicines from the future, and helped perform miracles with his invisible stealth suit.  Future Jesus also helped perform miracles by freezing time, and was able to fee 5,000 people with “seemingly” 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread.

But Past Jesus knew what he had to do; he needed to sacrifice himself so that Future Jesus could perform one last miracle and save the future.  By becoming so famous and feared by the Pharisees, they blindly freed Barabbas instead of Jesus at the trial.  Barabbas, however, would go on and begin the Dragon Slayer Bloodline.  Three days after Jesus died, Future Jesus emerged from inside the tomb, using the Time Machine, and told his disciples to begin the Church, and work with the Dragon Slayers, from now until the Final War, in order to save the future!

There have been long preparations for when Future Jesus will be born in our time because when he is, the Dragon Slayer will be found and we will fight to save mankind from the great Dragons and Giant Whore on the Back of a Lion (Revelations)!

And the story continues to unfold…

Since the beginning of recorded history we have developed a more complicated version of control for ourselves, beginning with God, and layering deeper into our psyche with laws, social norms, status, anxiety, and finally fear.  We now live in a self created world of illusion by choice.

To save ourselves from our violent and virulent behavior we are evolving a complex system of self regulation so that we can advance to the next level of existence… homo sapien sapien sapien.  It is only in a peaceful state that we can evolve to this next level that manages it’s existence on planet Earth with other species and observes it’s place in the natural world with respect and honor.

Humanity, prepare yourself for the introduction of your final stage of evolution… the illusion of the illuminati.  Created for us by our desires and secret thoughts, the story of the global control of humanity is unfolding in front of your eyes.  Look around and listen quietly, watch carefully,and  you will see in every story there is a link; a link to a grand scheme, one in the proportion of no other.

You see, this scheme was not created by one person… this is the final dimension of human evolution… our social psychology is doing something wonderful… with the development of the internet, telephone, and instant communication our species is finally able to operate on a level it never has.

Our social consciousness can now reach globally as waves of ideology waft in cyberspace colliding to create what you see today.  We consume the product… and create a need for it… that product is the final and global control of humanity.

This necessary control of the evil we metaphorically started when we bit the apple in the garden of Eden from the serpents hand is going to emerge with the appearance of a messiah.  All three religions have this messiah, and most of the world believes in one of the three religions. Every one of the three  most common religions started from sun worship.  So in essence, the root of these religions is the rebirth or the recreation of the Sun, or the messiah.  Ironically we named our messiah “the illuminated ones” or illuminati.  This vision (the illuminati) of our social consciousness will evolve to control our animal urges and allow us to evolve to the next level of enlightenment, look at it as the second renaissance of the human race.

An era where resources are respected and distributed with foresight, much like how you would handle your own savings account will emerge. And our violence will be controlled by our self medicating with any manner we choose (lifestyle) so that we can play a role in the movement of our species off this rock and to the heavens… to do what we have been craving since the last land mass was discovered on this world… to explore.

Just as dogs like to walk, and birds like to fly, humans crave exploration.  This curious ape we are all trapped in is a novel species.  One that likes to explore it’s environment, it’s own intellectual capabilities, and more importantly it’s own psychology.  We have the likes of Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Mozart, Issac Newton, Robert Boyle, Avicenna, Socrates, Beethoven, Jesus Christ, Ghandi, and Martin Luther King to thank for their contributions to just a small fragment of the overall knowledge and experience of the modern human being.

So in a divine and ironic way, this Truman Show that we each live, exists so that we can prevent the inevitable complete destruction of our existence.  It is only through this means of life, that we can control ourselves from hurting each other, our world and every thing that might come across our path in this thing called Life.

Soon, we will each have our own colloquial “apple” in our hands; just as shiny, just as beautiful, and just as irresistible as the first one we couldn’t help but bite.  The fruit, of this “new” garden of Eden will propel us to indeed another world, different from the one we live in now.  The Apples we all carry will locate us, they will connect us, they will help us share our ideas, and access the ultimate evolution of democracy, the internet.

I find it beautiful, and truly remarkable of our incredible species.

Bravo on this final molting and our final step.  Welcome home messiah… we look forward to traveling to the Stars with you.

s3