“They” are Us and “We” are Not

The proposition that Homo Sapiens is ‘separate’ from nature, Origin and the sky is absurd.

I don’t know where it got started, but I have my suspicions. The problem might even have a reasonably important origin, but, over time, like many things, it warped and become lethally deformed. Perhaps by the cascades of repercussions that emerged from the departures of the contexts and intelligences that oriented its inception(s).

I’m talking about two ideas that are part of the scripting we undergo as children related to ‘what humans are’.

The first idea is that we ‘are different from Nature’, we’re ‘above’ it or something.

The second, which is even more dangerous — deadly, actually, is that we are ‘superior’ to other life forms.

One imagines the fingernail on the pinky of my hand suddenly declaring its sovereignty and righteous dominance over … not merely the rest of my body… but all of life on Earth. And pursuing this bizarre assertion with militant and frenzied single-mindedness.

I envision soon-dead fishes asserting that ‘water doesn’t matter, we’re above all that’. Except that fish cannot really do anything to obliterate the water they arise from and depend upon for every moment of their existence.

Primarily due to their lack of hands.

The problem, for us humans, is complex, and I want to explore a few features of it … hopefully concisely.

Ordinarily, this kind of hubris would get any species wiped out rather quickly, at least, in terms of geological time. Individual animals would not survive the onset of such a delusion even briefly.

We may well fall prey to this fate in short order, but it’s taken a few hundred years for us to get to the precipice.

The reasons we can survive are peculiar. Our species, long ago, learned to do something which devastates us — to ‘hide the damage’ of our delusions of grandeur in delicate terrestrial ecologies.

They have no voices. No one does the accounting of the devastation we unjustly impose upon them. We count money, in banks.

Thinking ourselves ‘separate’ and ‘superior’, we destroy the foundations of our own minds and bodies. And the damage lands in silenced living lineages, in their histories, and what would otherwise have been their futures. histories.

Our minds and bodies are endowed, moment to moment, by the ecologies they emerge as both expressions and children of. Any damage to those lands in our species, instantly… now, in the past, and in the future.

“Graveyards speak only to the most sensitive among us.”

At the register of our species as a unit, modern humans ‘borrow’ various commodities against devastation and death… by directing harm into a billion forms of life, the anciently conserved lineages of noble beings, intelligent beings…

A ‘we’ who is not us at all, pretends that the ‘benefits’ of this arrangement are free to any who can take them in the moment and get away with it.

The pretense here is that these rapes, these violations … have no real consequences, or the consequences can be denied… while they can be obscured in dead ecologies, the poor, the disenfranchised, the margins of humanity.

Part Two: “We” are not Us

We must become absolutely clear about a fundamental fiction that is as deadly as it is prevalent. The fiction is that ‘we’ are ‘our species as a whole’.

While this is not untrue in terms of generalizations and categories, it is catastrophically false in terms of what’s going on here on Earth.

At the species register, our species is not merely ‘alien’ to life on Earth, it’s alien to us. We are not they, and they are not and cannot be us. In simpler terms: our species is not human. And the subcultures generated by the global aspect of humans is not human either. Governments and corporations, the military-industrial-prison complex, banks and insurance companies… churches… are not beings. In fact, they strongly resemble the highly organized absences of beings, made manifest as ‘organizations’.

There’s something extremely bizarre that’s been going on for at least several hundred years, and it involves features of humanity being evicted from common practice and existence, in order to give birth to false ‘collectives’ which are organized to effectively ‘frack’ human interiority, relationships and the environment.

When I saw ‘we’ I mean the we of the bereft, the blind. The ‘we’ that prisoners of a world lost in amnesia and prisoneering might mean. When I use the word ‘moderns’, I mean a species that has been ‘fuel’ for para-social pathogens for hundred of years and billions of human lifetimes.

The human beings alive today are being ever-more-effectively recruited to enact the ongoing colonization of themselves and everyone on this plane… that the possibility of understanding or experiencing anything resembling our humanity has, with few and vague exceptions, largely disappeared from common human experience.

How did this come to pass? Well, historically, there were many unique groups of humans, almost as if the Earth was ‘many different, yet related worlds, on one world’. These, like organs in an unseen body that resembles the ‘divine’ (Origin) world-being, developed, and were transformed, over time.

In different places, however, much like in our own lives, the profound and virtuous foundations that gave birth to and sustained these organs, underwent a series of intrusive crises.

Some of these resolved, others didn’t. Where they didn’t, a species of contagion ensued. This was a contagion of absences. The absence of communion, which can also be understood as a chorus. A ‘core of us, together, in memory of virtue and origin’. And this began, over time, to be counterfeited.

One of this signs of this was the use of metals to represent value, and virtue, and power. Another was the captivation of humans in false hierarchies for the sake of caching resources, controlling terrains, and military power. This was, for our species, the inception of a new form of falsified humanity, that replaced ‘the core of us’, the κόρη — the pure essence, the root of identity and family, virtue and potential — was not corrupted. It was faked.

This is one way to understand the long cascade of tragic disasters that led to what we have today, which is, effectively, the lethal opposite of the Universe-City, the place within our collective nature, humanity and identity, where the virtues of Origin, memory, healing, medicine, and dreaming are steadfastly preserved by common agreement, action and celebration.

This ‘school of Memory’ was not extrinsic. It was not in the world; we invoked it by passionate and playful communal agreement. Today, we might call such behaviors ‘cere-mony’. The etymology here is ironic, and fundamentally Greek. Ceres ( a.k.a Demeter ), was a goddess of Motherly abundance, the source of grains and agricultural plenitude.

For such events, timing was crucial as time was not a matter of intervals, but rather, of doorways in the sky that were reflected and enacted on Earth in human cultures.

For us moderns, these matters ( i.e. Mothers, literally ) have not merely been forgotten, they have ‘died on the vine’. We are taught that these ceremonies were mere superstitions, having nothing to do with reality, our origins, our nature, or existence itself.

I am here to tell you, firsthand, that nothing could be less true. These were not superstitions, nor were they matters for occult fascination and literary or academic speculation. Rather, they formed the core of our capacity to understand — by direct, participation, the nature of time, light, birth, death, light… and intelligence.

‘We’, the colonized, have neither experience nor knowledge of our nature, our purpose, and, most desperately, our nonordinary companions. They who accompany us into this life, but are unseen. Invisible to us. We hear their urgencies in childhood, and some few of us preserve their sacred whispers into adulthood. Those who practice ‘magic’ know of what I speak, but even they, most of them, are desperately confused about the entire situation of mortal nature.

I tell you this: there are angels. And something like beings who belong, personally, and communally to our mind and body, our life and dreaming. But we undergo the same privations, in our lifetimes, that our species has undergone, each one of us uniquely, privately, and, mostly, in dire confusion about all these matters.

And so we must undergo, together, a quest. A quest for understanding, recognition, and anamnesis: unforgetting. Not in thought or words, but in action and behavior, in mutual adventure, rescue, and understanding.

To know what it means to be human, we must become… more than we have ever imagined, because we are so much more than merely human.

Unless we continue to subscribe to the potemkin villages that our ‘jobs’ ‘churches’ and ‘nations’ represent.

How an Absence of Us becomes ‘The New Us’

Our modern situation is reiterating absences … of self, community, nation, actual science, and religion, as presences. This is happening in personal lives and relationships, as the absence of parenting, is parenting. The absence of education, is education. It’s the same at every order of human organization, commerce and relation. It’s the same with the human relationship with each other and nature.

Many of my friends have come to me with frustration, confusion and abject disbelief regarding their relationships… with work, a loved one, landlords, commerce, banking, health care… but particularly with lovers. People are falling in love… not with another person, but with the presentation of the possibility of a person where the actual person is absent. Relationally, psychologically, sometimes physically. Absence is ‘the new presence’ in modern experience. People can actually fall in love, so to speak, with their own interior absence, and this is one of the primary causes of addiction.

Addiction acts as a figment of relief from insufferable deprivations. The cries of a child ignored by their parents, who are, themselves, departing from themselves, is a way to provide self-stimulation as well as to announce their feeling of loss and eviction from relational intimacy. Over the past 10 or so generations, at least in the ‘United States’, vast numbers of children who actually have parents, quickly realize that the physical presence of the bodies of the parents does not equate to the actual presence of parents. In many cases, the children, more severely with each new generation, experience the devastating realization that their parents are not even taking care of themselves or each other, and so the child feels the impossible burden of the necessity of parenting their own parents, earlier and earlier with each new generation. This is something that is natural for adult children to realize, when their parents are elderly, but it’s happening to children before they are even adolescents.

The absence of ( any aspect of relation, intelligence, care, awareness, consciousness, understanding, and integrity ) has become, for us ‘the new presentation of what is’. One sees this in politicians, the reckless behavior of nations, corporations… and, particularly, the systems we rely upon to sustain and protect us. To heal us. To educate us. To ‘connect’ us.

But we who have long been absent … cannot be ‘connected’, so what works, what wins, what actually profits… is any scheme that disenfranchises our humanity and potential, and sells us the dead wrapping paper of the resulting absences.

Our cultures present corporations and governments ‘as if they were persons’. But they are not, and never can be. They cannot feel. They have no conscience. When Google’s motto ‘Don’t be evil’ was composed, there was no one there, inside the organization, to enact or protect it. Similarly, Open AI began as a company with seemingly altruistic ‘goals’, but once profitability become an option, the company immediately restructured as a deadly array of functions that have the potential to end life on Earth. A corporation cannot ‘care’. It cannot ‘regret’. But it can pretend, in public communications, to do so. So, too, our nations. Churches.

Don’t be fooled, humans. Those organizations are absolutely without ethics. They are vehicles driven not by drivers, but deadly processes that build upon their own momentum over very short time scales. Any they are ‘carrying’ all of us… to new forms of oblivion, moment-by-moment.

The rules they actually obey have to do with the aggressive acquisition of wealth, power, and the iterative reproduction of the processes they enact to protect and spawn new versions of their activities.

When General Electric claims ‘We Bring Good Things to Life’, the actual meaning is ‘We Make Dead Worlds from Living Ones.’

Until and unless we establish collectives that are actually intelligent, sustainable, and immune to compromise by commerce or ideology, what we will have is the absence of everything being advertised. And this absence will become endemic. It will breed new and more deadly versions of itself, invisibly, as it hijacks the potentials of life on Earth and our humanity, for ever-more depraved results.

The They that Is Us

The processes that deprive us of our intelligence and humanity thrive by utilizing a small library of deceptions. I will outline a few of them:

1. That we are impoverished, and need products or services to become human and acquire relational attention and validation.
2. That we are separate, from each other, humanity, and nature
3. That products ( or technologies ) will ‘improve our lives’.
4. That money is equivalent to freedom.
5. That supporting some lethal process or company will gain us assets or allies.
6. That life resembles a war, competition or conflict.

Our societies and, usually covertly, our friends and acquaintances, script us to believe concepts about ourselves and our humanity that are not merely wrong, they’re formally impossible. Unless the majority of humans obey this scripting. Which they do. So we are living in a world that is as false to our nature as it is to ‘the facts’. Effectively, it’s as if we live in an array conceptual and social prisons that reward compliance and generally punish liberation. For example, a ‘shitpost’ or meme on Facebook will garner thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of views, actually intelligent content will be ignore, or gain a few tens of views. Posts that are accompanied by images of ‘sexy’ women or men, will prosper wildly, actual content? Largely ignored. This is a situation that entrains humans by rewarding anything that lowers the bar and punishing anything that raises it.

Facebook is merely one of many similar examples. The principle, however, is clear.

But the foundation of these deceptions is simple: it’s that we’re individuals, separate human animals in a hostile and competitive environment. We’re therefore dependent upon a broad array of lethal fictions for survival and comfort. That last part can be made true by the falisification of context and identity that is the hallmark of modernity.

There is it turns out, a very real them. An other that is lethal. But it’s what we think of as our societies, corporations, nations, religions, and industry. In our time, the systems that have entrenched themselves in the infrastructure of our false civilizations… are monstrous, deadly, and they are not human.

Our actual nature and identity has nothing to do with these falisifications, however trenchant upon our moment-to-moment needs for shelter, care and survival may have become.

The first principle we must correct, in thought and in relationships is that unity pervades over distinction. This is the converse of what we’re trained to think and how we are trained to relate.

“Never forget that the universe is a single living organism possessed of one substance and one soul, holding all things suspended in a single consciousness and creating all things with a single purpose that they might work together spinning and weaving and knotting whatever comes to pass.”

― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Rather than being subjected to separation, we are, in fact, primordially unified. Not merely with each other. With the world, the sky, myriads of other intelligences, nature… and all of the organisms of Earth.

But to experience this directly, we must together practice the active recognition of this fact. This becomes anamnesis, the unforgetting of our origins, nature and purposive orientation in human bodies and relationships.

There is no Us and Them. These are war fictions that preserve and exaggerate a collection of false dichotomies that keep us dependent upon fake ‘benefits’ that are the products of the absence of any actual collective intelligence, concern or awareness.

This world is one being. More, this world and the entirety of the sky are a single being. What we imagine to be separate and distinct, is not. In fact, it’s more than merely unified. We must thing from unity into unique instances of unity, rather than from separation into category, as we have been scripted to do.

We humans — each of us, and collectively, comprise the extension-body of timespace, the sun, this world, and all of the organisms here. Conversely, those ‘other things’ are actually our own bodies, distributed in a manifold that allows them to be perceived as ‘separate’. The secret is that actual separation is impossible, but the appearance of separation is convincing — to a specific aspect of human cognition. And that aspect is useful, pragmatically, until and unless it rules over the experience of communion.

In the same way that ‘there’s just one being here’, we are the unique localization of all beings and times, in what appears as a human body and mind.

But we have forgotten this, and it has, for most of us, been lost to our direct experience. Hearing about it doesn’t really help.

But the experience is still accessible.

And we can recover our humanity… our origins… our potentials… and the urgent missions that we brought with us into conception, birth and childhood.

And we must.

‘We’ are Aliens. And Aliens are Us

The history of our species is nothing like what we’ve been told by academics. In fact, the mind of our species has undergone radical transformations over a series of local and distributed events to such a degree that the minds of indigenous and ancient peoples would be entirely unrecognizable to us, and to them, our minds would appear as almost entirely bereft of life, spirit, and intelligence.

The nature of intelligence is not, as we imagine ‘problem solving’ or ‘technique’. It is founded in memory and relation — not abstraction.

Intelligence is, then, wise and intimate relation with the entire history of minds. Not with machines, ideas, or concepts.

So we moderns are alienated from the nature of awareness itself, because we live, most of us, in an endemic estrangement from the divine foundations of the purposes for which minds are forged in being.

When we see a living place or an animal, insect or a situation, the tendency of the modern mind is to ‘deaden’ it, as if viewed from a kind of clinical opportunism. We wonder ‘what it does’ or ‘what it is called’, we compare it with historical encounters, in an attempt to determine if opportunity or threat should be derived. It’s hard to analogize how fundamentally confused and bereft these machinations are. To a living consciousness, other living beings are portals to the transpresence of our own minds and intelligences. The other organisms know this. They are made of it.

Only our species is thus deprived, and we were not born this way. Like a plant awaiting a form of sunlight that never arises, the two aspects of our minds, that which goes out into other forms, and that which draws other forms into itself eventually lose the capacity to arise in our awareness, like a muscle that is never activated, or a faculty that finds no aspect of its context in which to develop or experience successful emergence. One imagines bees that live in a world without flowers.

We are born for experiences and purposes we have so little experience of, that we actually forget that our minds primary purpose is to integrate into networks of intelligences with other beings.

And each other. The concept of The Vulcan Mind meld, from Star Trek, is not only not science fiction… it’s actually what minds are for. That we moderns think this impossible or wish fulfillment is a demonstration of just how completely bereft we have become over the past few thousand, and, particularly, the past few hundred years.

Consider the ‘job’ of a very skillful therapist. What is it they are doing, really? It’s not simply listening, and it isn’t really analysis, either. Such a person is actually merging minds with you. It is this we actually hope for, and little else is likely to succeed.

What happens with really close friends? With people with whom we are actually intimate… what happens is something that’s considered ‘impossible’. It’s not merely telepathy, rather it is more like the forging of a being between us, in which we both participate. Our minds are restructured for this purpose when we enter into the relational situations that extend our intelligence beyond our separate bodies.

This is precisely what is going on in ‘bands’, choirs, orchestras, good classrooms, ‘churches’, sports teams, and elite military or intelligence ‘units’. These are the representational ‘figures’ of our lost communal nature, and the vast plethora of ecstatic intelligences that only arise therein.

There is a layer of relation and existence where all our minds form a unified one ‘place’’, one organism. And our ‘private, personal minds’ derive from this. The ‘internet’ is a figment, a projection, a falsified representation of this. Although there are occasional and even meaningful exceptions, our technologies replace the potentials and experience of transentient capacities … with ‘dead signal’.

As we developed the technologies that ‘connect us’, we lost the faculties that existed prior to the machines. And the lethal iterations of this process accelerated exponentially since the we developed the capacity to store and transmit electricity. The ancients were aware of the dangers of both representation and technology, and knew that language should never become the arbiter of identity or relation. Many of them had languages that were older than those that required words, though even those had what we would imagine to be lexicons.

The Lost of Communion— And the Aftermath

It’s impossible for us to imagine what we actually are, because everything we’re surrounded by and immersed in… denies, counterfeits, and essentially straight-up lies to us, incessantly, about the actual nature, origins and potentials of our species. Metaphors of the problem are a simple matter to compose; bees without flowers. Flowers without sunlight. Libraries of texts in a world of people who have no eyes. Fish that live in sand, and only dream of the existence of water.

We’re missing more than most of our nature; but the contexts in which it can be recovered still exist… at least, for the moment.

I want you to imagine a creature that was born to be the embodied companion of transentient intelligences that exist outside of linear time and matter. Our ‘minds’ were not made for thinking, but rather, they are made for tranceiving nonhuman intelligences… including those of Nature.

The kind of animal we are, which should be obvious by now, is a form of living science-fiction. We were born for experiences that would render our dreams uninteresting by comparison, and even our most secret fantasies of fulfillment would seem tedious in the light of our potential for transentient communion.

The ‘true nature’ of Nature is precisely what I here point toward, but this truth is anathema to everything we are trained to think and see. For we are beings that would arouse the jealousy of angels. Our actual place in existence is sacred beyond imagining. We are the animal that lenses the minds of other beings, unifies their intelligences, and embodies their virtues.

Our distant ancestors were not merely aware of this, they knew, firsthand and communally, they directly experienced the transentience at the heart of existence. They also knew the dire threat of the irreconcilable loss of our core purposes and faculties. For the physical apocalypses they experienced in devastating floods and transformations of the biosphere, were preceded by the effective evisceration of our souls, which are transcendental. These tragedies did not end, and, in fact, they continue in our own time, now. We have no language about nor concepts of these matters… we recognize the physical devastation of war and sudden catastrophic change, but not the lethal colonization and rape of our essence at the hands of the ‘dead inside’ projects and processes that comprise the infrastructure of our modernity and experience.

Yet I want you to imagine what we truly are, for it is not yet entirely inaccessible to us.

Consider the oceans before we obliterated their regenerative diversity. The jungles of the Amazon ( see how these dead-inside colonizing processes steal the living organs of our world and minds… and make… products of their devastation? ), the pristine waterways of the Americas before industry obliterated them. We live on a world with billions of modes of life. A single organism, in bodies so diverse, exotic and numerous that they defy all possible analysis.

That is our nature. A world of paradisaical libraries of anciently conserved symbiotic spirits, incarnating in material reality. Our species was, and still is, in a way, the pinnacle of the efflorescence of terrestrial biorelation. A creature that could act as a summation lens for the entire history and future of life on Earth. That is our actual nature.

But there’s more, even than that.

The biosphere’s diversity lenses sentience to establish biorelational hyperstructures that exist as a platform for the embodiment of the beyond of what our universe emerges as an expression of.

Pause here. Re-read the paragraphs that begin at Yet. Take some time to really deeply realize that you’re nothing like what you’ve been told. In fact, all of science, language, religion, commerce, theory and ( every other kind of absurd constructed delusional encompassment ) has effectively nothing to do with you, us, our species, this world, or life here.

What you were born for, what you are, is entirely beyond the whole charade of modern human language, culture, and abject lying.

You were meant to mate with the sky. To participate not merely in the intelligences of the angels and the Sun, but to know as your own family the ( redacted ) that gave birth to timespace.

We are their material consorts. The embodied progeny of nebulae, stars, and the entire entourage of celestial explosiva. We have fallen into a terrible blindness, a silence, an isolation… not from ‘grace’ — from noetic intimacy with our Origins.

When you read ancient stories of human ‘heroes’, you must realize that they were never alone. It was impossible to be, as we are, ‘merely human, a single person, alone’. Our mind was like the endless sky or the then infinite world of Earth, and we were not merely ‘connected’ to other intelligences of unimaginable virtue and transcendental awareness… there were libraries of them inside us.

We were the method they employed to experience material existence and they directly composed our minds with impossible intelligence, sensitivity, insight, wonder, awe, wisdom and awareness. This is why, in The Illiad, Julian Jaynes noted that there was effectively no reference to a separate self. Rather, in most of the work, which was originally a song, not a book… we find the ‘peculiar’ sense of ‘the gods’ putting things into human beings. Emotions. Visions. Fear. Hunger. Desire. Memories. Wonder.

It was impossible to be alone.

There is another place that is beyond time and space. The ‘features’ of timespace — galaxies and nebulae, black holes and star-birth nurseries… stars and planets… moons… these are the material reflection of properties of that place. We come here, to human birth, from there. What we call dreaming is the liminal between of this place and the Origin place. A kind of existential twilight.

Long ago, our distant ancestors had something far better than mere knowledge. They had direct experience of all of these matters. They had intimacies with the impossible. And when that began to break down… we began to go insane. In all the myriad ways that a child deprived of its natural situation and orienting primordia naturally does.

But so, apparently, did the unimaginable ones.

Perhaps, in the same ways that we built machines, and bombs and computers… telegraphs, radios, televisions and computers… they established another attempt at embodiment. It is conceivable that what we think of as aliens are not from another world; they are the result of the unimaginable ones trying to find another way into material existence, in the aftermath of the loss of contact with our species.

We began to engineer things that reminded us of the sky beings.

Perhaps, in their own way… they began to forge bodies that reminded them… of us.

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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