The Earth as seen from space during a 2021 Solar Eclipse (NASA)

The Mission To Earth

A Recovery Operation

Our common ideas about the nature of Nature, organisms, spacetime and ‘reality’ are almost entirely wrong. The current state of our catastrophic disorientation at the register of our species and societies arises from a series of disasters in human conception that took place over the span of our cognitive and social evolution, with serious problems beginning in specific peoples and places around 3500 years ago.

This led to the domination of a strange form of cognition that values ‘representations’ above all else — including survival.

Consider that, for example, humans currently produce around 3.5 billion photographs per day. We create billions of objects that represent relationships we no longer actually participate in.

Organisms are now in direct survival competition with digital images. And they will lose, unless we transform our motivations.

This is a symptom of a disease that will erase the anciently conserved ecologies — overnight. And us, with them.

One result of this transformation in human cognition was an ‘elementalistic’ (see Korzybski on Elementalism) ontology/world-image, in which features of the living environment, organisms, bodies and minds are treated as if they are: a: objects (things) and b: separate. Relationships are dissolved into cash or commodities. Effectively, they can only exist provisionally… until someone figures out how to decompose them into money.

This is indicative of an interior ‘collapse’ in language and conception that is fundamentally disastrous to the possibilities of human knowledge and intelligence. It is partly the result of the urge to produce commodities at any cost coupled with an incredible fascination with representations.

Elementalistic thought and speech transforms our minds, limiting our conceptual and relational access to a vast array of conceptual and relational possibilities.

In effect, this damage resembles the collapse of a manifold.

A many-spoked bicycle tire gives us a simple model of the process involved. If the desire is to reduce the complexity, we can end up in a process that, over time, disposes of all the spokes except one. The tire is now useless, but in consciousness, no one notices the spokes disappearing, or the fact that the wheel is now too flimsy to support weight.

In this analogy, the resulting conceptual forms cannot support insight.

This is actually a model of how thinking, writing and speech are composed: we collapse a manifold of all the possibilities to those we intend to pursue. So, too, with purpose.

This world-image leads, intrinsically, to Endgame. It is literally a form of group-delusion that might be understood to be seeking correction by overt misbehavior which is naturally resultant from intentional misconception. Often this results from injuries to the mind and psyche.

One could reasonably speculate that our species, angry over being abandoned by ‘the Gods’, went insane, and began intentionally attempting to get their attention by doing anything and everything that could possibly invite judgement. This is a traditional trope in nearly all monotheistic religions, but to any psychologist it clearly resembles the behavior of an infant that is unable to acquire the positive attention of its parents.

I’d like to suggest that not only are the Gods still listening; we’re made of them. And the Earth is, actually, not merely a sentient, intelligent being, she’s transentient. Sentience, as we experience it, is a side-effect of who the Earth is being — and her missions.

Could we, as a species, learn to recognize and intelligently participate in those missions again?

I say we must.

Over thousands of years, our idealizations of the world collapsed into single-valued, mechanistic ‘thing’ vs ‘thing’ models. The reason this can succeed in human cognition is that the damage that would otherwise result from a completely absurd world-image… is offloaded into Nature. The anciently conserved ecologies… the moment-to-moment origin of our bodies and minds… take the hit silently.

Because we no longer listen to their voices. Many ‘rational’ humans today would not even believe it is possible to ‘listen to’ Nature, other organisms, the ocean, the sky… or the forests. Having no experience of this, and no concepts about it… Nature appears to them as an array of commodities ripe for harvest. A collection of ‘dead inside’ objects.

If indigenous peoples attempted to treat the world as we do, they would rapidly die of the results. Perhaps some of them did. We moderns — our societies at any rate — just continue to watch the world burn under the weight of our object-cultures as if we are viewing a film, and as if we are ‘separate from’ or ‘above’ Nature.

One imagines fishes who thought they were ‘above’ water, because they swim.

In a truly bizarre turn of events, the only animal we know to be formally representationally cognitive… turns on its origins, attacking them with incredible mechanical force.

And even if we mourn this, what can we actually do?

Elon Musk, the strange pioneer of many modern technologies has implied that his interest in getting humans off-planet is due to the probability that the window during which this is possible is very narrow. Since it effectively exists now, or nearly does, he feels we should do everything possible to get humans to Mars as immediately as is practical. This is a sensible perspective, in its way.

It is probably true that our window of opportunity to get Earth-life onto other worlds is narrow due, primarily, to three problems: the rapid propagation of machines, war, and environmental collapse. I have listed these in order of their most likely precedence: the first is directly productive of the other two. While the Earth might be able to support 8 billion humans for a while, it cannot support 8 billion humans and 10 billion machines. Those machines offload entropy directly into the living infrastructure of our planet far more dramatically than any organism could.

For living worlds, that kind of entropy is death.

We’ve been trading ourselves for images and models. The anciently conserved nurseries of life are being made into, for example, charcoal. Objects and functions. The most delicate and invisible assets first. Most of those are in our children, our potentials for intelligence and the living planet.

And what we are getting in return is museum objects. Dead referents. Clean, well-behaved objects we can store, categorize, refer to and manipulate with the soothing appearance of expertise. While we burn our cultures and the living planet to the bone.

It’s a poison we’ve seen too often in our social, artistic and intellectual history to ignore. The shell our cultures comprise has become toxic; if we do not break it now, it will crush us within its ever-inflating projections of falsified images of our nature, our purposes, our minds and our humanity.

For a habitable or humane future we must reach beyond the frameworks we previously established and appear to trust. Like teens reaching for adulthood, we will -leave our world- of habits and perspectives… in order to invent new ways of being collectives and individuals. It will not look like what’s on sale in the toxic cultures we’ve produced. It will look like social, ecological and relational prodigy.

If we choose this. And this is the choice I suggest, because that is the nature we carry, and that is why it has so long and urgently remained co-opted.

Like many, Musk makes bets on the future, and he is aware that we will most likely destroy ourselves and most if not all of the environment within another window that, probably briefly, in terms of years, overlaps the first one.

He’s aiming for the place between these windows; where the technology to get us offworld exists or can be engineered, and we haven’t yet become been crippled by the social or environmental results of our omnicidal group-activities.

Whether it is actually possible for humans to live in space or on nearby planets is not known. We are extremely delicate creatures, and it may be impossible for our minds to survive beyond the narrow band of the Sun’s periphery within which we originate. But the idea has some merit, however dangerously misguided its priorities may be.

Why misguided?

Because we need a mission to Earth. Now.

While the ecologies still exist. We will need them to understand our own nature, potential, origins… and intelligences.

Something similar to Musk’s window-game is happening closer to home, and we should pay it serious attention.

There’s a window that’s still present, perhaps quite briefly, for our species to stop running malware at the group-level. For us to establish intelligent societies and re-establish contact with Earth and the membrane of organisms on her surface that are both our ancestors and the inside-out womb in and for the sake of which our species exists.

Sounds impossible. Obviously Musk thinks it’s literally harder than rocket science, which is so difficult that it’s become a trope. And he’s right. At least, in the big picture. Most of those who consider these matters believe that the only thing that could possibly interrupt the rapacious devastation of our minds and our environment is a catastrophe.

And since we’re busy accelerating the onset of at a whole library of different catastrophes; ‘yesterday’ was too late. Unhindered, the malware that has captured our species at the group-level is going to continue to drive us to either wipe out most of the complex life on Earth or undergo sudden, vast reductions in population and, probably, technological ability.

But there are a couple of options that hold promise, and don’t necessarily involve war or devastation. One is Game B, an approach to attempting to engineer something that could overcome Game A (‘malware’) — which is clearly lethal in even the short-term.

Effectively, if we can give modern humans something better to do, be, learn, and become together… we’ve got a shot at a future worth belonging to and saving at least some of the remaining ecologies.

It seems, at first glance, unlikely that a social system can arise within the current context and either convert or out-compete the opponent systems. But it’s something we must urgently pursue. Our species has been dumping our developmental and evolutionary origins, resources and momentum, primarily, into machines for at least the past 200 years. Meanwhile, we have entirely failed to establish anything resembling an intelligent or survivable collective or nation. This is the most critical mission facing our entire species, and it is a mission that leads beyond nations, corporations and representational ideologies.

And the chance to understand not only what it is and can mean to be human… but what it means to be more than (merely) human.

For hundreds of thousands of years and billions of human lifetimes our people have lived beneath the starry skies dreaming of futures worthy of our ancestors and children. And all the organisms of Earth dream alongside us.

It remains within our power… to fulfill or exceed these dreams.

Or to destroy them forever.

It is clear which side our existing cultures take; they do not care about the dreams or the future of our living planet. What they want is power, authority, cash, and commodities. At any cost.

We did not establish these cultures. They are literally antiquated ‘operating systems’ that were previously effective only because they could find a place to offload the damage they produce on human beings and Nature.

We have to find a way to invent and install new operating systems at the order of human behavior where we form enormous groups. Corporations. Nations. Societies. And we are going to need to have the freedom to experiment, learn, and grow ways to accomplish this together, so we must form contexts in which this goal is pervasive.

Try to imagine the confusion of an actually advanced, spacefaring intelligence observing the societies of Earth…

Most of the planets in timespace cannot support complex organisms without the assistance of machines. But around here, we have a world that has no need whatsoever of machines… and we’re building so many of them, so quickly that… if something doesn’t intervene… our world will become like those others; incapable of supporting life without machines.

It’s almost as if the humans are trapped in a bizarre, ironic myth that confuses them so hopelessly that they value machines above anything and everything. Above life, above the past, above the future, and far above sanity and intelligence. And if that hypnotic trance is not interrupted… immediately… it must end with… the necessity of machines to survive at all. It’s almost as if we’re trying to bring the unsurvivable environment of space to the surface of the Earth.

There’s an accessible version of Game B that we can actually learn and implement together and it is oriented around our nature and evolution as animals that learn, discover and find fulfillment in small, tightly-knit groups that share a noble mission.

For nearly all of our developmental history, prior to the establishment of settlements and agriculture, this was our way of life. Conversely, it is possible for such groups to develop and function in ways that are resistant to capture by the malware our societies comprise and are captured by. We are, in this way, a bit like dolphins, whales and bonobos: we are pod animals.

It may be that much of our misbehavior at the species has to do not necessarily with the loss of contact with Gods, but rather with each other and nature. When meaningful roles and missions disappear into mere representations, humans become miserable. And this is most of what we call work. Vast populations of modern humans live in poverty, socio-economic subjugation, and contexts so absurd that gangs, religions and corporations begin to seem like viable survival options.

We can change this, by introducing an array of possibilities and opportunities that would give common people the experience of working together, with and for each other, and the history and future of life on Earth. We can create meaningful roles… an enact them together, for purposes so noble and true to our inner nature… that no one would oppose them.

Ordinarily, in an emergency situation, you will often notice people naturally assembling small, highly-effective response groups ‘on the fly’. This is evidence that we still have the capacity to form effective groups together when the stakes are high, and, right now, they have never been higher… and we have never been more distracted.

That word is drawn from the concept of traction; the ability to gain purchase upon something we push against in order to move. It means, the failure to gain traction while attempting to move.

The Limitations of Science

What selection of ways of knowing would be useful for a mission to Earth? The answers are complex. Clearly, science is one of them, but I want to explore why we need other ways, and why we should be cautious about validating this method’s ‘natural’ authority.

The ways of knowing that fall under the umbrella of science are among the most reliable humans have ever engaged in. Yet, for at least the past 3 centuries, the foundations of science have become objectivist, reductivist, deterministic, and mechanistic. They begin with the idea of evicting experiencers. These days, science is almost entirely captured by this goal. And while useful in its scope and methods, it’s dangerous, too.

Around the 17th century, the advent of Newtonian physics had the peculiar effect of equating mechanical models and observations with ‘the facts’, and projecting this as enlightenment. The problem was this: nothing is as authoritative as a system that can predict the future of other systems, as well as testing and validating these predictions. Most of science, and nearly all of physics is literally oracular in the sense that it successfully predicts the futures of experiments that limit the frame of reference so as to test specific features of situations. Nearly no form of thought, other than mathematics itself can lay claim to this ability. In the wake of these discoveries, a new form of knowledge emerged. What could compete against the demonstrable ability to accurately predict the future of a system?

As science gained gravitas, crucial aspects of our human cognitive, intuitional and relational approaches to awareness and understanding were dismissed as trivial, unproveable, or simply delusional. It quickly became fashionable to imagine a universe whose entire purview could be discovered by nothing more than making mechanical measurements of phenomena and testing the resulting conclusions by physical experiment.

This mode of knowledge is certainly authoritative within its proper scope. But it is deeply troubling when it escapes that scope to project this authority on matters of deep ontological significance — many of which are simply not explicitly mechanical. This mode of mechano-objectivism is a religion in the sense that, when it escapes its useful purview, broad (and often insane) declarations are made about the nature of reality, time, space, light, organisms, and so on. Or, conversely, what ideas we must never entertain as scientists.

While we must not dismiss the findings of skillful scientific research, neither should we project their authority beyond their limited and meaningful scope. Science doesn’t tell us what things and beings are; rather it offers insight into their functions, and structure. It is and must remain ontologically incomplete. The portion of ‘reality’ which science has acquired purchase on in the past 150 years is astonishing, but it is similarly minute. It’s unlikely that we have learned even 1% of what is probably accessible to us about anything.

Science alone will never reveal the rest of the picture, because much of the nature of the universe is not directly accessible to the modes of inquiry native to present-day scientific motivations, ontologies and models.

I remember hearing someone say that science must undergo a radical perspectival shift of the sort that resembles this transformation of waking consciousness to dreaming, or the radical shift in ontological experience that happens under the influence of psychedelics. We have to find inroads that could reintroduce science to beings and the nearly infinite depth of their ancient relationships with time, light, living worlds… and each other.

There are many modern researchers who are not reductivists or materialists; unfortunately, these ideologies still dominate their fields and the expectations associated with the milieu of scientific research and the publication of research. John Lilly was a forerunner who was deeply aware that nature is a manifold of complex intelligences. His life work was an attempt to get humans and other scientists to understand that we might be able to establish direct contact with them. One of the primary barriers to this potential is the idea that human intelligence is preeminent.

It’s not. But it might be incredibly adept at forming intelligent relationships. It could be that what we need isn’t a giant antenna listening to the sky, but rather, new ways of understanding the nature of our own minds, origins, and relationships with Nature. It is blatantly obvious that our planet is a an unimaginable library of physicalized and relational intelligences. And we are made of everything required to initiate and sustain meaningful contact with them.

We need more minds like Lilly’s, but in order to produce them, we need radically different modes of education, orientation… and multidisciplinary synergy.

We do not know the meanings of the existence of light. We do not know what the nature of physical reality pertains to. And, shockingly, our understandings of organisms and their actual nature (not merely their biology, but their origins and purposes) are incredibly primitive, reductivist, and mechanistic. Is it not likely that organisms are a manifestation of the nature of timespace itself?

It’s not likely. It’s certain.

While rationality is useful, it can also be devastating to the possibilities of human intelligence when it becomes disoriented by the race to produce physical technologies (these are mechanical representations of organismal activities and relationships), resulting in alienation from the nature of organisms and their relationships. And our place within the universe and our living planet.

The idea that humans have ‘risen above’ the other organisms is formally absurd; it is absolutely clear that our unique faculties are the result of our relationships with the history and future of life on Earth. In the same way that fish do not ‘rise above’ water by swimming, humans do not ‘rise above’ the the origins of their consciousness in their filial relationship with Earth life… by thinking.

What we need are ways to directly contact the Earth, the organisms, and, perhaps, the Sky. We need something like science mixed with relational prodigy. And the dreaming mind might be part of the key that could unlock the cage our modern minds have too long and desperately been trapped within.

An indigenous shaman, a cellular biologist and a naturalist swim into a lagoon teaming with life…

This isn’t the beginning of a joke.

The Primacy of Dreaming

Our waking minds are notoriously addicted to a variety of intrinsically problematical modes of consciousness that are oriented by attraction to representation, tokenization, and ‘grasping’. In simplistic terms, these represent the opposite orientations of dreaming consciousness, which is involved with insight, relation, participation and awe. The waking mind forges narratives that resemble its ways of being ‘abstracted’ from the world of experience, while the dreaming mind might be understood to be the remedy for this.

It appears that ancient and indigenous humans had not yet undergone the strange arrays of cognitive and relational circumcisions that are the imprimatur of us moderns and our relationships with language and technology. Indigenous cultures encountering ‘colonists’ were faced something completely unfamiliar to them: men whose minds and societies had been completely captured by representational cognition and the insatiable urge to reduce living beings and the environment to commodities.

While the colonists pretended goodwill and communal respect, they ‘saw’ the people they encountered as ‘primitive’, and so were totally duplicitous in their displays of recognition. Effectively, the colonists perceived the indigenous peoples they conquered and enslaved the same way they saw animals: disposable resources and impediments to ‘progress’. But these colonists had, themselves, been ‘colonized’ in their interiority by concepts that crippled their minds, relational assets and conceptions of human beings, animals and the living world.

The ‘standing secret’ here is that we, as human beings, undergo an invisible interior tragedy in our development from infancy to young adulthood and beyond. The faculties of dreaming, natively present to the waking mind of the infant and child, are eventually overcome by the forces of enlanguaging and representational culture. They are then (in a parable resembling that of Cain and Abel in Genesis) exiled to the land of Death/Dreaming.

But these faculties and their capacities to inform us about our natures and abilities … can be recovered. We can create the contexts in which such missions can arise, prosper and succeed. The alternatives certainly justify whatever risks we might face in such noble pursuits.

Pod Game — A Game-B Approach to Being Human Together

I want us to imagine a small team of perhaps 5–7 people, who decide to learn how to form a distributed intelligence system together. Cribbing from a broad range of historical and present-day techniques, such as those that intelligence operatives are trained in, they ‘practice’ operations that involve solving problems produced by various forms of malware.

I want us to imagine — the enacted opposite of war. Peace is not that opposite, but rather, the interval between military conflicts. The opposite of war is a dedicated array of missions as deeply human as they are situated in environmental relation, awareness, understanding… and contact.

Through experiment, play, and ongoing research, we could form teams capable of effective and altruistic quests in response to the situations that presently plague our planet, peoples and day-to-day lives.

In the beginning, as key concepts were being understood and developed, such teams would employ a ‘baby-steps’ approach, where they begin by selecting missions that resolve a selection of trenchant problems in the lives of individuals and communities. But they would also ‘play’ at ‘taking over’ representational contexts and manipulating them for the benefit of those who are oppressed or victimized by them — a form of altruistic society-hacking.

Such teams would undergo highly specialized training in flexibly adaptive technological and psycho-linguistic fields. They would learn to effectively analyze, psychographize and directly influence key players and the social structures involved in producing, sustaining and distributing various modes of social, economic and environmental malware. By identifying and ‘capturing’ core vulnerabilities, these teams would slowly begin to demonstrate the ability of otherwise ‘ordinary’ people to quickly resolve problems that otherwise appear permanent and intractable.

Children naturally form such groups, especially when encouraged and given the resources to explore that comprise a friendly context for such endeavors.

Once established, such groups could reproduce their gains by guiding, training and supporting other similar endeavors around the world. I imagine the teams themselves to remain small for a variety of reasons, including an array of problems that arise in human groups when they grow too large. I suggest a maximum size of 11, varying from 3 to perhaps 17, with a preference for odd numbers.

The vast library of our faculties, intelligence, behavioral and relational assets natural to human beings is largely unavailable to most of the population. By inventing games and methods that allow us to recover and discover these precious assets, we could invent something adventures that represent the opposite of war — ways of learning, cooperative play, and team-oriented adventure that are as meaningful as they are exciting.

Either we advance together, with and for each other, or we fall apart.

Now.

Our planet is literally dying. The entire history of Life on Earth, the dreams of every human and organism that ever lived, are now fundamentally at risk of being obliterated. But the potential to recognize and embody them together… still exists.

What might it mean to us as human beings to overcome the actual enemy of our species and Life on Earth? To begin to remember and fulfill those dreams together, instead of putting them to the torch?

All human beings are born with innate assets and urgently felt purposes that are mostly obliterated and compromised by the linguistic, cultural and technological contexts in which they develop.

Could we compose a buffer that would protect, encourage and support the development of skills and abilities that are entirely natural to us but profoundly inhibited and captured by the anti-cultures by which we are presently dominated?

Yes, we can. As soon as we decide to… and commit ourselves to the Mission to Earth.

A mission synonymous with the dreams of all of our ancestors… human, environmental, and… celestial.

In our generation, the potential for human-enacted Endgame is real and immediate. We must develop actually intelligent societies, motivations and communal modes with the capacity to deflect the societal ‘asteroid’ that is presently aimed at us and the anciently conserved ecologies.

There are existing examples of similar endeavors. The Sea Shepherd Conservation society is one such example. Damien Mander’s IAPF is another. Both of these organizations are small-scale attempts to form effective teams that gain crucial tactical effectiveness over time. Mander’s group includes ex-military operatives. Another group is, of course, the Game B alliance. All of these are worthy of note; but what I suggest here is the establishment of a basis to train and empower people around the world to explore new ways of being human together. Ways in which specialized education, research, adventure and experiment produce highly effective teams with a diverse array of nonordinary skills and abilities.

What might we become together if we began to explore the origins and features of the diseases that present as social and economic systems? Could we empower small groups of humans to act as something resembling our own immune system in relation to these problems? We can. And, in the process, we may begin to remember the actual nature of our relationship to Life, the Earth, the Sun, and timespace itself.

At this grave juncture in human history, we could acquire allies in this process of forms we have rarely imagined. Right now, people capable of helping to sustain the anciently conserved ecologies and protect the living membrane of the biosphere would not merely become heroes… they might be able to directly contact the Earth as a being. And her allies would become their allies.

We need a Mission to Earth.

And part of that mission involves rediscovering and exploring the actual nature of organisms, ecologies, living worlds, humans, and the origins of the malware that is currently running human societies, economies and the military-prison-industrial complex.

This is a rescue mission of infinite adventure oriented around purposes that are as urgent as they are noble.

We need to remember, together, what it does and can mean… to be human… and more than merely human. Life on Earth comes from space(time). We have learned nearly nothing about this fact. The Earth can be understood as a mode of life that arises in space. What is her nature? Is her mind available to human contact? Does she engage in missions?

Who are her allies?

Could we become them?

Clues and Catalysts

The cosmologies of many indigenous and ancient peoples were vastly different from ours, which are severely damaged by representation. It is possible to recover our orientation not merely by study of their ways of thought and life, but by reinitiating a broad array of (to us) counterintuitive perspectives, activities and relationships. In the following segment of this essay I will briefly sketch some starting places as a thought experiment. I hope this may be useful to readers who have struggled to understand what I mean by a fundamental perspectival shift in human thought that might empower us to begin a new chapter in the development of our species.

What if there isn’t anything else but an ancient and superbly intelligent alien — all around us — and within us — in millions of forms we simply aren’t willing to credential?

What if the signals SETI is hoping to find in space, are actually right here?

What if there isn’t anything but those signals and they exist in the dimension of living relation, rather than radio waves?

Let’s run a thought experiment about the Nature of Nature and the Earth. In this perspectival shift, we will begin by imagining uncommon perspectives. We’re going to play with the meanings and understandings of a few key ideas, in a quest to return some degree of insight to them, together.

Many aspects of the problems we presently face have to do with ontologies that are effectively ‘dead inside’ and ‘object-oriented. So let’s introduce some perspectives that might equip us for such a mission.

1. The Earth is a more than a merely ‘intelligent’ being. Any world in space that begins to produce life, becomes at least an organism. It is not an object. We should think of the Earth, and the Sun as well, as transentient. beings who produce sentient life as a repercussion of their identities, activities and relationships in timespace. It is completely possible for humans to contact the Earth, and we’re made of everything needed for this mission.
2. Spacetime itself, is probably more like consciousness than it is like machines. It naturally produces organisms, and minds, on worlds like ours, but what you will never see is timespace producing machines. The only forms of life that do this are, like ours, formally representational cognitives.
3. We will change the precedence of distinction in our minds to that of unity. So we will think of life on Earth as a single organism. Imagine that there’s an organism whose natural ‘state’ is comprised of complex ecologies of myriad ‘discrete’ forms of biorelational intelligence. One creature, many forms. We will similarly imagine ‘the universe’ as a unity first, distinct features… second. It then becomes clear that all of life on Earth is life originating in the nature of timespace. We can learn to think of Earth as a condensate or ‘crystallization’ of the character and nature of all living worlds in timespace.
4. We will imagine our species not as having ‘risen above’ other forms of life or Nature, but rather as a species with the unique ability to act as a unifying agent at a special order of intelligence that is uncommon in other organisms. In this sense, our species might be understood to comprise a ‘summation lens’ of the entire library of organisms on Earth, their histories, dreams, and futures. Their intelligences.
5. We will begin to imagine that the nature of organisms represents a fundamentally purposive and intrinsically intelligent aspect of timespace that is accessible to human relation, curiosity, wonder and concern. We will learn the methods and activities together that will allow us to explore this effectively together.
6. I believe we need to think about time in ways that differ dramatically from our common understandings. The age of life on Earth is demonstrably (far) vaster than the age we attribute to the Universe (13.5 / 27 billion years). Single organisms on Earth almost unimaginably older than anything we are likely to understand with our present ways of thinking (that were already outdated in 1950). A single housefly, is, for example, the result of 235 quadrillion life-years of evolution in its own hereditary line. We must begin to understand the nature of time as it relates to organisms, environments, own bodies and minds. It turns out that there are certain features of existence that, if you get something this fundamental wrong, will stymie every other attempt to learn or understand that you may make. Time, Light, Organisms and the Sun are crucial examples.
7. With the recognition of the damage to our lexicons, categories and ontologies, we will endeavor to discover how to repair them together. In this pursuit we can crib from psychology, indigenous languages, theater, cognitive linguistics, metaphor theory and Korzybski’s Null-A logics, as well as indigenous ontologies.
8. Actions in the present transform the meaning of the past by the production of different outcomes for previous world-lines. We can change the meaning of the entire history of life on Earth, by changing how we understand and respond to the dreams of the entire array of living ancestors. If we choose to obliterate them, those dreams will die in the outcomes. If, instead, we recognize and enact them together, we will gain access to allies of forms we have been too distracted to imagine. And many of those potential allies are not merely ‘not simply organisms’, some of them are transcendental to human categories.
9. The Earth is a complex array of nonhuman intelligences, but it’s extremely likely that advanced nonhuman intelligences are paying attention to and concerned about terrestrial situations, particularly now, as we are poised on the brink of a precipice from which recovery is at best unlikely and at worst, impossible. What would it mean to become aware of and cooperate with the anciently conserved intelligences of Earth, and those native to timespace? So far, we moderns have been doing the opposite: burning down the networks of life, intelligence and potential futures for our world and people. A 180° may seem unlikely at this point, but we can assemble the necessary skills and intelligences that would radically alter those probabilities. We have the necessary precursors, and we certainly have the motivation. What is required is an array of self-correcting plans, strategies and missions… that would return meaningful roles to the vast masses of living humans today.

“…humans are the stewards of life on Earth whether or not any divine mandate is involved…. because we are the only animal we know of that has the capacity to intentionally protect or destroy the biosphere.”

I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and the origins of our species.

As a cognitive activist, my dream is that my work may contribute to our ability to understand the origins of our strange situation as modern humans, and assemble effective replacements for what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of.

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