Domesticated primates running digitally on extra-terrestrial software

Chris Kirk

6 October

I am a human being trapped in an alien landscape of domesticated primates running digitally on extra-terrestrial software. I personally don't identify with the culture in which I was born, but luckily I meet beautiful human beings who transcend their culture just for a moment with me sometimes, or sometimes for their whole life. I am glad I am here surrounded by these strange and fascinating people. I want to smell them and touch them and look into their eyes, but there are strange psychic barriers in the way sometimes. I don't know why.

Darius

Critical mass eventuates population collapse once environmental equilibrium unbalances to an extreme which creates a point of total instability. The bees are dying on mass.  If pesticides and fungicides are not completely eradicated global famine could result.  The US may default in 11 days, if their debt ceiling is not raised global economy will implode and world war could follow as per usual. If these 2 events do not manifest due to intervention there are many more potential actions of global human culture that are pushing the limits of tolerance that could collapse. Survive and contribute to writing the new paradigm that will naturally follow. Prepare, unite and survive.

Chris Kirk

I am ready. I am just gathering up health and sanity, cos I may need a stockpile. I can't handle this civilisation farce anymore. I wish the people who love me would just come be with me here in paradise. What the fuck are you all doing in the cities? Are you really trying to play that game? Have you noticed you are losing? Have you noticed that the people who are winning are more miserable than you are? Or that people are collapsing into sociopaths all around you? Withdraw, my friends, please. Come roll in the grass with me, swim in the ocean before it's totally radioactive, help me learn how to sprout and graft fruit trees. I don't want to come visit you in TV-land anymore.

Eva-psyphae Macula

All very well and nice. But if all the people leave the cities your little bush huts and self-sufficient circle jerks of xenophobic culture cringing will be lost and you'll just have crowded beach and trampled grass.

The console works just fine, the software needs updating, but all controls are still intact and the levels are all still fun. However I think its fair to say that we all need to chip in on a rather large power bill that's been stuck on the empty fridge door for centuries. Like any shared house situation, those that are accountable are not always responsible and others ended paying more than their share.

If the '60s and '70s can teach us anything, is that the '80s and '90s is what happens when that approach is taken. Abandoning the game does not finish the level. It just leaves a seriously fucked character with only a few lives left and the boss to face alone. Group hugs and acid won't fix this problem.  Nor will burning spears.

Coded language, psychic cyphers and data bombs will be our tools.  Our generation is that lost child who crawled his way through the flower fields of zombies and reality gameshow sets to find his tribe dancing in whirlpools of splintering metal tectonic bass, and screamed with ecstatic affirmation and agonizing confirmation in the middle of the moshpit, we are indeed fucked.

As the monitor flickers in the dark and the controller lays cold, the world burns.  The war dance is over.  It's time to take back the city.

Chris Kirk

I hope that one day I will take my children or my grandchildren on field trips to the cities. They will see the decaying buildings, skyscrapers with hundreds of glassless windows covered in vines, pavements cracking, streets of weeds preparing the soil, metal and concrete skeletons of alien technological non-entities from some dark fairytale that actually happened, unexpected reclamations of industrial, commercial, so-called "pubic" spaces, fungi consuming piles of plastic. 

I will walk them through like a museum of filth and perversion that is slowly collapsing back into the soil, the earth finding ways to consume it all over thousands of years. I will tell them stories about what went on there, the uniforms, the bureaucracy, the stress and the hopelessness, the cars and the pollution, the Economy and the shopping malls and stupormarkets. 

I will then take them home and tuck them into bed to dream of a better world, a world I am not capable of imagining, so compromised and traumatised by paranoia and cynicism. They will create a better world in the remains of what we are too scared to confront, disassemble and abandon.

Darius

Cities can be wonderful places which hold an important utility for humans and have for many millennia; I don't know why anyone would hope for their destruction. I think it makes much more sense to hope (and work to to create) in the future that cities and the people who live in and manage them evolve them to become clean places of artistic beauty, social vibrancy and environmental harmony.  It can be done, we have the knowledge to make it so globally.  There are many people all over the world right how who are working to make it so. 

To wish otherwise and to think the world can only be improved by destruction seems rather narrow minded, selfish, short sighted and ignorant. Cities don't take up alot of land area actually and many people greatly prefer living in them to living in the country side. Oh but you don't like them therefore they shouldn't exist at all and destruction should be hoped for and relished, despite all the good people that love them and would feel a great loss to live in a world without cities, who hope to and work at removing the negative effect they have environmentally.

Christy

Remember, dear friend, all is as it should be, if you are truly in the moment (reality). If you think it should be different, then you are arguing with reality.  Insanity.  They should, they shouldn't, he can't, I can't, etc.  Love what is.  If you don't love what is: PAIN.  The Work of Byron Katie. Highly recommend it. Peace brother.

Darius

Do you actually realise that if cities were all gone then there would be a lot less green spaces in the world. If there were weeds preparing soil then there would be much more soil being removed everywhere else. As I said cities take up far less land area per person than in the countryside since everything is built vertically, and since they are built from glass that means far less trees need to be cut down to build all the houses which would be needed if there were no cities. Besides it's a fact that cities pollute less than the countryside with all it's cattle.  Glass and steel don't eat cattle, people do, and they would whether they lived in a city or not.  If not, the meat would be transported further, rather than the singular small area cityscape, creating a greater carbon footprint.  Glass is made from sand which is abundant in the many desert waste lands on earth and steel is mined from isolated places. Deforestation, for lumber and cattle, and nuclear technology are what need to be removed.  As it is now, cities could be what is keeping the earth from destruction by population overload.  If everyone left them it would create even more strain on the environment due to lumber needs and energy used for greater travel-distances.  Everyone would need a personal car to visit family and friends and employment, rather than public transport. 

Not everyone wants to work from home, not everyone wants to grow their own veges.  (I fucking hate gardening with a passion, if I had to grow my own food rather than pay someone else for it I would consider that a misery and a waste of time.)  Though many others I know love the garden and almost always grow with a huge surplus.  Some of them love piano music but would hate to practice to hear it.  I love to eat fresh organic produce. The earth and everything and everyone in it need people to hope and work towards improvement, a greener environmentally harmonised city and countryside culture, simple. What it doesn't need are hyper-emotional, reactionary people who just want to see it all burn, who are just plain weak.

Chris Kirk

http://www.personaproductions.com/2013/10/paterson-by-allen-ginsberg.html

Ivanovic

And thank god for Chris Kirk also.

The power of consciousness to accept and the ineffectiveness of consciousness to control

"When we're unaware that we share the ability to co-create reality with the universe itself, that power slips away from us, causing our dream to become a nightmare."

I love self-help books that remind us we need their help cos we can't do it ourself.

I am a powerful person sometimes and sometimes I throw my weight around too much.  I know I am right most of the time but sometimes people assume this therefore means they are wrong and they are wrong in this assumption.  All our consciousness can do is maintain some sort of balance between the habitual and novel influences of the world.  If my presence has a novel effect on people I have to be careful how I place myself in relation to their sensitivity and the beauty inherent in it because I have no intention of threatening their vulnerability.

The most powerful thing consciousness can do is to merely accept.  I usually accept the life I have created for myself and the person I have become and I therefore would like to place myself in an environment that not only strengthens me but an environment that I strengthen as a result of my presence, because my presence is all I have to offer.  I do my best to be respectful by washing dishes and mowing lawns but if small things like this have become relevant then the power of my presence has become irrelevant and I am weak and pathetic and must move on.  I need only challenge myself with the profound and that which resounds deeply because my life is too empty and impermanent to worry about the small things that impact a more precarious equilibrium lifestyle.

The astonishing feat of maintaining our metabolism is, of course, entirely unconscious.  God is not doing it, it is not happening by chance, we are definitely doing it.  No amount of consciousness could possibly maintain this process, let alone improve upon it.  Our consciousness can merely choose where to place us - amongst microwaves and televisions or amongst trees and flowing water.

Why do we choose one and not another?  Is there a reason or is there no reason at all?  Do we eat randomly or do we choose precisely what we want to eat?  Do we eat the food that makes us feel the way we want to feel or do we choose to eat food that makes us feel something we choose not to feel?

I have to tell you that regardless of how developed your consciousness is, it cannot change the words I have chosen in composition and communication.  I have written these words whether you like it or not and your consciousness merely allows you to choose whether or not you continue reading them (not whether you have already read them).

Our consciousness is also sometimes called our ego.  For some reason one is separated as good, the other is separated as bad.  In this momentary linguistic model the two are inseparable.  Our consciousness is inherently insane (not bad) and chatters with itself incessantly and repetitively.  It defines us as the most unusual animal on this planet.  Calling it insane reflects little.  What our consciousness is largely doing, whether we ask it to or not, is creating meaning, telling stories, defining and refining myths for the purpose of externalising our interior world and containing it in symbols and metaphors.  This is our process, this is our purpose on this planet.  This is the intention on this planet whether we are conscious of it or not.  (The opening lines of John suggest this.)

Six months ago I took a ferry from Turku in Finland to Stockholm in Sweden.  I have friends in Stockholm who I intended to stay with.  However, I did not tell them I was coming.  I arrived in Stockholm without anyone knowing I was coming and made some phone calls for a place to stay only upon arrival.  These phone calls were ineffective for various banal reasons and therefore I had nowhere to stay.  When I had spent a lot of money making expensive cash calls on the public telephone I wandered around looking for somewhere to lay my head.  I slept in the park.  The following day I tried again on the public telephone and achieved an equally ineffective result, did not contact my friends and was therefore still alone and homeless.  By the end of the second day, after hours of rain, I did not want to be alone anymore, I did not want to sleep in the park in the rain, and I wandered off into the city looking for something I knew I wasn't going to find.  I finally had an emotional break-through and began to cry.  I acknowledged all the love and all the homes I have been blessed with in my life and felt intensely their lack in my present situation.  I shook and sobbed and stood feeling silly and bawled and wept.  It was a painful and powerful emotional catharsis and I of course survived it.  A few days later I was telling my friend Disa about this difficult beautiful experience.  She reminded me of something I had said a few days before I had left her to make this trip across the gulf.  "I never cry.  Even when I want to I can't do it.  I think crying is healthy.  I wish I could have a good cry."  Did my deliberate actions manifest this desired experience despite the fact that I never once considered it consciously?  You can consider this in the abstract if you like, but the effect the realisation had on me was physical.  It illuminated for me a constant process of unconscious manifestation in every moment of my life.  I might look at something and judge it bad, "this is not what I want in my life", but the reality is more real and the reality is that I created it, not through some mystical psychic manifestation process but through my actions.  I clearly intended it despite the fact that I didn't consciously anticipate and plan the consequences.

If this is a genuine personal mechanism that I have momentarily noticed, is this happening on a larger scale?  Are there some profound and disturbing implications in this model?

I spent 2005 obsessed with someone, "in love" I called it at the time, smoking a lot of marijuana, beginning to fail my degree and therefore my passion and focus in life and being depressed and taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (antidepressants).  I had no ideas about how to get myself out of this lifestyle and wasn't even considering that I need to get myself out of it.  But I am not in this lifestyle anymore, I got out of it.  My mother committed suicide and the shock and grief was so intense that it disrupted every aspect of my life, destroyed the linguistic constructs I was living by, and forced me to reinvent myself.  This was such a powerful process that I managed to create a completely different lifestyle that made me a completely different person and alerted me to the possibility and necessity of transforming myself periodically.

The possibility that this particular cathartic situation was intentional may be considered more difficult to accept than the previous example, but it seems to fit, if only on a mythical level.  It raised some significant and illogical implications about my mother and I making some sort of unconscious or higher-dimensional agreement that presumably also included others who were affected by this situation, such as my father and my siblings.  When thought through the situation raises many interesting possibilities about the interconnectedness of the universe.  Quickly the connections and implications become to complex and far-reaching to consciously think about, let alone contain within words.  Maybe I could communicate this experience to the face of a human being who is listening with a profound openness that taps into the depths of my unconscious understanding, rather than in this moment of sitting in front of a computer alone.

I have heard the concept that life is some sort of ladder-structure, a climb from unconsciousness at the bottom of the ladder to enlightenment at the top through the process of becoming aware of more and more things.  This doesn't equate so well with my experience.  You may decide I that I am implying that this concept is wrong, whereas I merely offer an alternative model.

My model is that life is a series of vicissitudes, fluctuations between novelty and habit (as Terence McKenna suggests), ups and downs.  Everybody is somewhere on this scale.  They are not above you or below you on some cosmic scale, but simply moving consistently along their own.  We are all either heading through habit into catharsis or through novelty into climax.  Those heading towards catharsis cannot be touched and cannot be helped, those heading towards climax will love and appreciate your input and your insight, absorbing as much as they can from a variety of sources.

I possess and arrogant and self-righteous tendency to interfere with people's lives.  I want to help them because I love them but all I'm doing is trying to change them when I should be accepting them.  I realised this when my friend was depressed.  The most beautiful man on Earth as far as I knew at the time and so I couldn't accept the fact that the joy in which I met him had become depression.  I tried to "cheer him up" until I realised that the most loving thing I could do is let him be depressed.  I honoured his depression and remained present with him in his depression, rather than trying to change it.  This actually made it easier to love him.  Thus we return to the power of consciousness to accept and the ineffectiveness of consciousness to control.

I noticed this vicissitude model when I got myself into a state of marijuana-fueled depression again in 2008 and this time actually felt the exact moment when I hit the bottom and started coming back up again.  It got to the point where I found myself stoned and curled up in a ball in the corner of the living room, whacking myself in the head in an effort to externalise some of the pain I felt within.  And then I felt a distinct shift in the vibrations of the room, felt a sudden surge of energy, stood up and began immediately to undertake the tasks that went on to transform my life powerfully and permanently.

So you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
from a cold steel rail?
A smile from veil?
Do you think you can tell?