In the previous blog I mentioned scientist Alun Anderson. I like what he writes here about consciousness, and instinctively, and wholeheartedly, feel kinship with his thoughts. He begins with intentional sarcasm, to make his point:

I believe that many quite simple animals are conscious, including more attractive [than cockroach] beasts like bees and butterflies.

[B]y consciousness [I mean] the feeling of “seeing” the world and its associations. For the bee, it is the feeling of being a bee. I don’t mean that a bee is self-conscious or spends time thinking about itself. But of course the problem of why the bee has its own “feeling” is the same incomprehensible “hard problem” of why the activity of our nervous system gives rise to our own “feelings”.

But at least the bee’s world is very visual and capable of being imagined. Some creatures live in sensory worlds that are much harder to access. Spiders that hunt at night live in a world dominated by the detection of faint vibration and of the tiniest flows of air that allow them to see fly passing by in pitch darkness. Sensory hairs that cover their body give them a sensitivity to touch far more finely grained than we can possibly feel through our own skin.

To think this way about simple creatures is not to fall into the anthropomorphic fallacy. Bees and spiders live in their own world in which I don’t see human-like motives. Rather it is a kind of panpsychism, which I am quite happy to sign up to, at least until we know a lot more about the origin of consciousness. That may take me out of the company of quite a few scientists who would prefer to believe that a bee with a brain of only a million neurones must surely be a collection of instinctive reactions with some simple switching mechanism between then, rather have some central representation of what is going on that might be called consciousness. But it leaves me in the company of poets who wonder at the world of even lowly creatures.

That to me is very cool.

The full article is here (pan down to Alun Anderson’s article).

We’re somehow in this together.

I’ve written about this before, but here’s a version of the idea from Alun Anderson in the Economist. Basically, we are not alone, and we are not what we think we are.

100 trillion microbes live in the average human. Given that the body contains only 10 trillion cells, some scientists joke that the human-microbe hybrid is 10% human and 90% microbe. Their total weight is only slightly less than that of your own liver.

I love that last line. All the microbes weigh slightly less than your own liver. Think about that. A liver weighs about three pounds or, say, three butter squares. It’s like a massive sac of microbes. I’ve even heard that in one square centimetre on any given part of skin, a hundred thousand microbes are eating your (or my) dead flesh.

The full article is here.

We are not alone! Speak kindly to these workers. You are a universe, or, at least, the head of a giant company, and you do not pay well. If they get a union, look out.

Love to you and yours, whomever they are,

Pete

A funny aside from the Iran-Contra Affair from the Reagan years, where everything illegal possible took place, and no one served time. I read about this in the illustrated version of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History and then looked it up on Wikipedia:

Admiral John Poindexter, under [George] Bush, Director of the Information Awareness Office; in Iran-Contra, found guilty of multiple felony counts for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and the alteration and destruction of evidence, convictions reversed.

Nonetheless:

In Poindexter’s hometown of Odon, Indiana, a street was renamed to John Poindexter Street. Bill Breeden, a former minister, stole the street’s sign in protest of the Iran-Contra Affair. He claimed that he was holding it for a ransom of $30 million, in reference to the amount of money given to Iran to transfer to the Contras. He was later arrested and confined to prison, making him, as satirized by Howard Zinn, “the only person to be imprisoned as a result of the Iran-Contra affair.”

Supposedly he spent four days in jail. Breeden himself admits he was a “rabid, communist-hating redneck” in the 1960s. As for the Iran-Contra and its years of illegalities at the highest level, Ronald Reagan pleaded, more or less, that he had no idea anything went on at all.

Here’s to history and justice,

Pete

I was just reading from the first chapter of physicist F. David Peat’s Blackfoot Physics, and found engaging his simple way of describing the inherent limitations of thinking consciousness no more than brain, stuck inside the tin can of our head. He writes:

If you happen to hold that human consciousness is no more than the epiphenomenon or secretion of our individual brains then you are more or less trapped in your own skull. But if consciousness is open, if it can partake in a more global form of being, if it can merge with the natural world and with other beings then indeed it may be possible to drop, for a time, the constraints of one’s personal world-view and see reality through the eyes of others.

The poet Robert Graves, for example, believed that he was possessed by the spirit of one of the Cesars when he wrote I Claudius. On several occasions the historian Arnold Toynbee was projected across time and space to become a participator in another historical era. In one case he found himself in Italy of 80 BC witnessing a suicide. On another, while walking near Victoria Station, London, he had the experience of being plunged, not into a particular historical period but into the entire passage of history and time.

I love when that happens. Okay, it’s never happened to me.

But I love to hear of the wilder experiences of great thinkers, into other worlds/dimensions/ways of seeing. What can we make of such observations? Time travel, past life, curious dreams? What a dream it is to be part of this tangled and untangled, wondrous web of being.

Sending tons of connected love, somehow, some way,

Pete

“From our vantage point, it is difficult to envision what a truly sex-positive culture might be like.”
—Daniel Pinchbeck

I’ve always thought the word love to be incredibly sweet and incredibly inane at the same time. It just has so many meanings as to become, in some ways, meaningless; like God, or Liberal, or Christian or Free (as in Free Market).

I’ve also for years wanted there to be (or wanted to find) an English word to describe a person with whom you don’t have any intention of having sex, but who nonetheless excites you, makes your heart beat, and is wondrous and titillating, interesting, intelligent, exciting, appealing, sexy and charismatic (and probably doesn’t even know it)—a person you would just like to make feel great, but with a non-pick up caveat.

Alas, no.

A word you could say as a compliment.

Words like sexy or titillat(ing) are too specific and not accurate, for the feeling is also like attractive and intellectually intriguing etc. Words like randy and horny are a disaster, for obvious reasons.

“Hello, I’m in a relationship. You make me randy” or “Hello. You titillate me.” It’s not that bluntness at all.

Basically, I’m talking about a person you meet or know and whom you see as a wondrous reflection of that incredible beauty and intelligence that humans can possess—at least with or to other humans.

Believe it or not, I meet a lot of people that are compelling intelligent and sexy in that way, and beautiful, and yet they might not even know that, or feel that. And I wish I could just say, “You are so _______”, and the person would feel highly complimented—not feel like they’re being hit on—and would truly get the meaning of their own sexy, intelligent beautifulness.

But due to our paucity of words, one must be covert to express such delight!—or say nothing, when, as Mark Twain once said, “I can live for two months on a good compliment.”

Anyway, I am reminded of this by a paragraph from Daniel Pinchbeck’s wild and wonderfully thought-provoking outpouring 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (pg 328).

“[Jungian commentator Robert] Johnson notes that the English language reflects our emotional paucity. Ancient Persian and Sanskrit possessed more than eighty words for love, denoting different qualities and valences of communal and erotic feeling.

Whether we want to proclaim our affection for Krispy Kreme doughnuts or our significant other, we are stuck with just the single word, obliterating differences and qualities. Locked in limited rationality, men tend to suffer from a profound incapacity to understand or explore their own emotional makeup.”

English is a world-conquering, ever-expanding, massive language. Isn’t it remarkable what can’t be said?

I’m not sure Daniel uses the term non-dual correctly, but maybe he does. I would use the word unified, but that’s just me. But how connected to and conscious of undeniable interdependence and unification can we be? What a great question. What a great exploration. What a miraculous life.

Lots of love because you’re so damn smart, titillating, charismatic, beautiful and compelling, and I am wonderfully, joyfully in love already,

Pete

“They who have put out the peoples [sic] eyes
reproach them of their blindness.”
John Milton, 1642

Sorry about my lack of writing, but I’ve been away for a while, writing.

In my blog below, I asked what Matt Taibbi meant by carbon-tax speculative bubbles, and wonderful Karen gave a clear and informative response, here with links as well (I haven’t checked the links yet).

But twisting environmental protection into a ponzi scheme or worse, a speculative free-for-all with the inevitable bursting bubble? Is nothing sacred? Okay, things are definitely sacred—maybe the whole thing is—but, man, if there’s an angle, the lesser-angels are all over it, with their lobbyists and endlessly obscure legal language that blind us with bullshit.

As for the thoughtful response to the question: Thanks, Karen!

Lots of love to everybody, learning,

Petexo