The Princess and The Drunk.
A song for single mothers.
And even more
A song of regret.
something beautiful in brooklyn
The apocalypse will not come today.
But slowly and surely it is coming…
Whether it be the innate problems of overpopulation,
The planet cooling or heating beyond our threshold,
Or simply a giant rock hitting Earth as it does from time to time…
It seems that humans, like most forms of life, will have a finite lifespan
The real question is philosophical:
Has the story already been written?
Or are we writing it in every moment?
Or simply..
Are we created
or do we create?
I tend to believe that the “God” force is a cumulative one…
That karma is not a boomerang…
But the wood out of which we build our houses.
So if we may suspend our mysticism for a moment…
I’d like to look at what we’re creating.
I find it extremely interesting that the moment we realize
That our environment is rejecting our industrialization
Is the same moment
That industrialization brings us a means for a global, “collective” conscious
The Internet.
Since the dawn of man
Shamans and scientists have been theorizing
That knowledge doubles in half-lives
So if it takes a thousand years to double human knowledge
The next time around it will take 500… and so on
If you follow this out… eventually you should reach a point of enlightenment
“All knowledge at all times”
All knowledge at all times seems to be the exact point of the world wide web
Even if it’s still a ways off
You can see it on the horizon.
Or maybe consider Raymond Kurzweil’s theory of singularity
Nanotechnology (which is the manipulation of matter on a molecular scale)
Used to be a pipe dream… but now is in practice at it’s most infant stages
The point is that once machines begin to “learn”
We don’t know what the implications will be
As organic beings— our central nervous systems “learned” in pace with need
We became “smart” in ways that were suitable for our environment
Machines will not necessarily have that hurdle…
Which is why the change could be rapid and all consuming…
Maybe a complete “illumination” of our earth…
All things under a single awareness
But, of course, maybe not.
It does make you wonder…
What is alive? What is conscious?
The binary code is strikingly similar to our own DNA
When you look at the planet’s current response to our way of life
The fate of the “biological human” looks dim
The apocalypse looms…
But maybe … just maybe
We are currently in the process of
Creating our own ancestors
I just hope they do a better job than we did.
As the storm rolled in
I walked down to the shore
Simply for the purpose
Of feeling small against nature
I leaned hard against the wind
Felt the rain like a thousand dull needles across my face
Pulled my collar high and my hat low
Then watched, helplessly,
As the sky turned black
The water got high
And my city got swallowed up
In one easy gulp
Right before my eyes
Small, indeed.
And scared…
Time slowed down .
And I involuntarily slipped into presence.
I began to notice the voice in my head…
Began to follow it
Slowly but surely I came to realize that the voice was my own
The conversation was with “God”
WAS God
And it’s content…
Was the whole of my existence
I also realized that
Not a sole alive
Other than myself
Has ever heard a word of it
I was in parts at ease and uneasy
knowing that I am …
That we all are…
Completely alone.
But are we?
After all…
This dialogue involved nothing BUT others
My friends and my family
Those I’ve turned away from…
Those who have turned away from me
Relationships were the thread that made the fabric
A dialogue of wishes …
Of love and of safety
Of pain and neglect
A dialogue that begged and pleaded only
NOT to be alone
So I wondered
Is this the dichotomy at the root of all others?
The ones that permeate every facet of existence
From electron to proton
From dark energy to gravity
Matter to anti matter
Day to night?
Is THIS the
circular nature
of existence and time?
After all…
From the inside looking out
I see only one… and that is myself
But from the outside looking in
I see only one
And that is us all
Thanks for writing.. I’m so happy that it helped you feel a little better!
It’s actually a crude interpretation of the first stanza of the sonnet
“Come On, Sweetheart” by Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
All of his stuff is really quite amazing… definitely check it out:)
Hope to hear from you again!
Danny
The Nature of Nature.
Ever since I’ve come back from Burning Man there’s been something on my mind…
You see..
At Burning Man you meet a lot of good people
People who are out to stop hunger
Stop war
Save the planet
Make things a little more just in a lot of different senses
In fact.. There was a giant replica of Wall St. that they eventually blew up…
While 50,000 people cheered
And I’m all for this…
Being kind… Being fair
But the thing is…
I don’t see that much difference between Wall St. and Burning Man
In fact — I don’t see much difference between Wall St. and anything for that matter
Every family, church, school, government, sporting event, yoga class or shamanic circle
I’ve ever participated in
Seems to be under the same genetic guidance
A voice telling us to establish a pecking order
It’s kind of the elephant in the room whenever you talk about anything spiritual
Or anything social
or political for that matter…
It’ the Nature of Nature.
Not HUMAN nature.
Nature.
And it’s not necessarily pretty.
Depending on your perspective..
Let me try to explain..
Say you go to a national park …
While at the park you watch a bear catch a salmon from a river
There’s three perspectives there.
For you it was a stunning example of the circle of life.
For the bear it was lunch.
For the fish… the fucking worst day of it’s life.
Or when you stumble upon one of those giant, old trees in the forest…
It feels almost magical
Have you ever noticed the ground around it is almost always baron?
And did you spend one moment thinking about all the lesser plants that sadly
lost their nutrients to the magical, old tree’s giant root?
Or how in the last blog I talked about cells…
The body makes a bazillion cells to make a single fingernail
Then tells all but the top 1% to kill themselves because they are no longer needed
Sound sort of familiar?
Is it evil?
I don’t know… I just know it IS.
In a Darwinian sense… it’s what life DOES
I strongly doubt the cells know they are dying for a fingernail…
And that’s my point.
It’s nearly impossible to see the purpose from a perspective.
Is it possible human life is just some sort of cosmic fingernail?
I’d say it’s probable.
I recognize this whole concept sounds kind of cold…
Make no mistake..
I would truly love to see everyone have enough
And we could…
Everyone could have JUST enough… right above the poverty line.
BOOM - problem solved..
But is that REALLY going to happen?
Are the haves REALLY going to sacrifice that much for the have-nots?
Is that REALLY how you ever see life play out?
So what to do?
I certainly don’t believe a change in policy will matter much…
In fact … if you tore the whole system down…figured out the bugs
Built a new one where everything was equal
Where everyone was represented..
I could almost guarantee, given enough time
It would look about the same as it does now.
Survival of the fittest is programmed deep inside every thread of our DNA.
But I say there IS a solution.
While human beings as a species are probably just a cosmic fingernail…
A human being (singular.. and this goes for all living things)
Is the entire kitten caboodle
Through the power of perspective we embody the entire experience
If I may quote Jesus Christ
“The Kingdom of God is inside you”
So… if you want “change”
Then change.
Smile
Be kind.
Be the world you’d like to see.
If enough of us do it… maybe we, as a whole, will transcend being just a cosmic fingernail
Or maybe we won’t.
A psychedelic priest once asked something of me that made this whole mess make
a little more sense…
He asked
“If I draw a circle
And I put every thing that exists in that circle
Everything that’s EVER existed
The whole universe …
And then you put your finger in that circle
How many things are in that circle?”
The answer:
2
Your finger
And everything else.
What is consciousness is one of the great questions… but I think an even better question is… what is conscious?
Most people that have a dog… or know a dog… or know a monkey… would tell you that it’s conscious …
Humans and dogs and monkeys seem to be pretty similar creatures… we have a decent line of communication between us —and so I figure, if we’re conscious, then they’re probably conscious as well.
How about cats? Most cat lovers would say yes (a bat shit crazy conscious, but a conscious ) so i’ll say yes too…
But if cats and dogs are conscious.. i feel like it’s only fair to say all mammals are conscious
But why stop at mammals? What’s so special about them?
I’ve seen birds futz over their babies… seems pretty conscious to me..
Fish? Insects? Plants?
When I was a kid at Bible school … we did an experiment…we had two little saplings
One the pastor asked us to pray for every day… the other he told us to give all our negative thoughts over to…
Not only did the prayed-for tree grow… it did it at a rate of 10 to 1 over the negativity tree
Seems pretty conscious to me…
So what’s that mean?
Is life inherently conscious?
Maybe?
And if so…
What about cells? Not only are they living … they are by far the most abundant “life” on Earth.
In fact, if life has been around for 5 billion years… for 3.5 billion of those years life was exclusively just single cells…
Then, much like humans, they joined forces in the search for food.. thus creating the first multi cell organisms…
In fact, there’s numerous lines to draw between humans and cells..
For instance, they join tribes
You may be a kidney cell or a brain cell…maybe a white blood cell
They work together in a societal manner… taking and giving orders… in fact.. if you look at cells underneath a microscope they damn well seem to socializing…
Conscious.
So could it be our human conscious are made of millions of smaller more primitive consciousnesses?
Why not?
And if so… does that indicate the possibility that the human conscious is a smaller more primitive part of more complex collective conscious? Maybe Earth’s conscious?
Definitely seems to be pointing in that direction…
Here’s another thing about cells… something that might hint at the shear nature of existence… of our perception of Good and Evil…
Cells are created in gross over-abundance.
If 20 cells are needed to create a fingernail… your body makes a thousand… chooses the best 20 and then tells the rest to kill themselves… and they oblige.
This seems like a giant waste. Almost evil. But for evolution… this is the quickest way from A to B.
And so it IS. Not good. Not bad. Just IS.
The nature of nature.
Seems to be this way in a lot of things. Maybe a solar system is made so one planet might thrive. And a million species on that planet are made so that one might thrive. And maybe 7 billion of that species will be made so that an elite 1% might know an existence more rarified than history has ever seen.
Maybe?
But even in all this brutal carnality … there’s the beauty of the whole.
Is this where our concept of “Good” (God) comes from?
Sure, cells are small bits of the human framework but without them there is no human.
I’m willing to bet humans serve the exact same purpose in a bigger, scarcely realized paradigm
Begging the question…
Who is God without his worshipers?
Could it be that God IS his worshipers?
We spend so much time wondering why we were created (at least I do)
But maybe the real question is why do we create?
I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to get outside our own consciousness enough to understand.
But it makes you wonder…
Is there a tiny little blood cell, sitting in a lonely vein— deep inside your very own heart —wondering to himself… the very same thing?
I think we can safely assume… maybe.
Someone decorated my decoration;)
Spotted in Williamsburg…have to say I agree;)
Truth?
By definition truth shouldn’t be open to discussion. It’s an absolute term.
And it’s necessary.
Perceived truths are the building blocks of progress
(although progress is a somewhat nebulous term as well)
So I’m not going to suggest that truth isn’t “true”
Instead…
Might I suggest that truth is fluid?
After all… all things we understand… we understand from the perspective of humanity.
(which in so many ways… is limited)
Let me give you an example.
Gravity.
Gravity is one of the guiding principles of physics..
it’s a truth that has tremendous influence over HUMAN existence…
(what goes up, must come down)
And our understanding of this truth has led to heaps of human progress…
But say you’re a water skimmer bug…
Gravity would seemingly have very little pull on your day to day activities..
Surface tension, by contrast, would be a far greater concern.
Of course, a water skimmer’s reality in and of itself is of little concern to most…
But what about systems in which we are extensively intertwined and dependent upon?
Say, the solar or galactic systems?
For years we took for granted that gravity was their guiding principle as well…
Until we discovered that the universe was expanding…
and it’s expansion was ACCELERATING
Last year 3 American’s won the Nobel Peace Prize for this discovery…
Their explanation… Dark Matter
A weaker, yet more prevalent force than gravity on a cosmic scale
That— when applied to large bodies for extended time periods—
Actually pushes particles AWAY from each other
But much like gravity and the water skimmer…
dark matter SEEMINGLY has very little to do with our day to day experience…
or does it?
And how many other forces are out there playing a part in our existence?
Gravity surely isn’t the only law of physics that has cracks in it’s omnipotence…
They nearly all do…
This doesn’t make them UNTRUE per se
It makes them A TRUTH
One of trillions …
All taking varying degrees of importance depending on your perspective
It’s the concept of a SINGULAR TRUTH, too often used in the defense, promotion or persuasion of a very HUMAN idea, that I find debilitating
Not too long ago the Sun revolved around the Earth…
The basic elements of life were Fire, Earth, Air and Water…
And all of our heavenly bodies were just that…
gods looking down upon us
But truth is fluid and it will continue to be
That’s what makes life so magical
I think Democritus of Abdera said it best in 360 BC
(although laughed at by the scientific community of his day)
“The only existing things are atoms and empty space; all else is mere opinion.”
And that, in my opinion…
Is as true as it gets.
