SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
Every child is subjected
to aversion training against peace. As
a result, we grownups refuse to sort our information politics into their
weapons and peace components, nor accept world peace.
I cut short
correspondence with a so-called "progressive" who concluded, quite pleased
with himself, that World Peace wouldn’t happen for at least forty years: the
time it would take to eliminate his responsibility for it, since by then he
would be retired or dead. According to
him, people are just not ready for it; they’re not blessed with the superior
morality he is obviously endowed with…
I won’t name him,
out of pity. After all, his was a
general malpractice, not an exceptional one.
In most cases these days, the responsible party is not named for fear of
his reprisal or that of his supporters.
The moment the weak came to harm, Learners should call out those
responsible, regardless of consequences, as long as the weak were
shielded.
In a PeaceWorld
Agora much more elegant than our corresponding
lashup on WeaponWorld, those whose policies were responsible for human
suffering otherwise avoidable would be stripped of power. Guilt and regret for one’s
misdeeds would become a major preventive measure—no matter what that might cost
in the meantime. The current practice
of disguising one’s failures in anonymity would be forbidden, as much on the
Internet as during institutional misdeeds.
For example, the 2006 murder of Anna Politkovskaya,
the brave journalist who served as steadfast conscience for the Russian State –
whatever the cost – should be laid at the feet of Vladimir Putin whose birthday
was the day of her murder, and of his murderous crony, Ramzan Kadyrov, head of
the Russian Chechen State.
The following
human rights workers, poets journalists, lawyers and judges have been murdered
in Russia, most without serious investigation or follow-up arrest.
·
Nadezhda Chaikova, 1996
·
Galina Starovoitova, 1998
·
Igor Domnikov,
2000
· Yury Shchekochikhin,
2003
·
Paul Klebnikov,
2004
·
Ivan Safronov,
2007
·
Magomed
Yvloyev, 2009
·
Vyachsla Yaroshenko,
2009
·
Stanislav
Markelov, 2009
·
Anastasia
Babourova, 2009
·
Natalia Estemirova, 2009
·
Serguei Magnitsky, 2009
·
Edouard
Tchouvachov, 2010
·
Rouslan
Akhtakhanov, 2011
·
Gazbek Guekkiiev, 2012
·
Mikhail Beketov (beaten into a coma and multiple
amputations, 2008), 2013
Many more state-sponsored
assassinations have gone unreported by the Western Press (54 journalists since
1992). Russia won’t recover its slava
(glory) until it starts protecting their replacements with as much deliberation
as it sacrificed impulsively those listed above.
Wasting those
national treasures and terrorizing their replacements by criminal acts would be
unthinkable for legitimate leaders of these states. On PeaceWorld, this disgrace would have ejected them from office
without appeal. Yet on WeaponWorld,
those people thrive from their inconceivable transgressions. They are not alone on WeaponWorld, on the
contrary. Almost every current ruler on
WeaponWorld would lose his war crimes trial before the World Court.
Compared with
most people I've reached out to, this guy was pretty optimistic about the
prospect of world peace. Here is how
this planet’s sad burden of weapon stalwarts sorts itself: an overwhelming
majority that asserts that world peace is impossible, worthless and evil; and a
handful that maintains it might be worthwhile, but quite unlikely in the near
future when they would be personally responsible for it. Let someone else do the heavy lifting!
How convenient
for him, babbling his platitudes!
Needless to say, he wouldn’t lift a finger to help me in the
meantime. Neither he nor his cohort of
‘progressives’ good for nothing but wringing their hands and whining about how
nasty people and current events are.
Take your time,
Bubba: be it for the next forty years or the last five thousand; your results
have always been the same. Weapon
mentality has always prevailed over you and your progressive hopes, because you
never stepped forward to champion the cause of peace, despite all your fine
talk.
World peace may
break out, one way or another. Either
our military insanity will kill most of us off and a few survivors will default
to peace, or Learners will rally and make it happen : by design, voluntarily
and soon.
Reactionaries
won’t touch this topic because it betrays their primary motive and motivator of
others: fear. Trendy progressives
(equally fear struck) dismiss this topic as talked to death and thus neatly
support the reactionaries—despite all their fine talk.
This text reviews
the mentalities of weapons and peace as if they were discrete, coherent and
self-willed entities (memeplexes).
Their schemes compete, grow strong or weak over time and influence mass
thought. Peace and weapon mentors are
spokespeople for invisible but powerful forces. Their actions, words and beliefs are constructive and destructive
reflections of the collective superconscience. A few more thought-constructs may help us
clarify this concept.
Jean-Jacques
Rousseau spoke of the general
will, which prescribes the greatest common good for all: the
sole source of government legitimacy.
Under the general will, everyone could restrict their personal will yet
still come out ahead in the long run, since that is what it does best.
As far as Western
philosophers are concerned, it grows from the bottom up: from individuals to
the heights of government sovereignty.
The Chinese and their oriental disciples talk about a “Mandate of Heaven” prescribed by
Confucius (Kong Fuzi, K'ung-fu-tzu),
which alone renders legitimacy to government by virtue of its ritual harmony
with cosmic law. It grows from the top
down to individual depths.
Each is
considered mandatory, by its supporters, for good governance. I suspect they are basically identical. Cosmic law, government authority and
individual freedom: all three would have optimal frequencies that harmonized
best with the others. Detune this
optimal resonance at any of its three levels, and suffer disaster as the system
shakes itself apart. Without the
general will, we would sink into chaos; without government power, things would
fall apart like in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (no taxes, no
government, no law except at gunpoint: a Republican Paradise); without the
Mandate of Heaven, mass rebellion would become mandatory.
The government
must be the central tuning fork of this harmonic system.
Freud
spoke brilliantly of the subconscious. Personally, I am unaware of it (just
kidding). Nowadays,
everyone recognizes that they are fitted out with a set of subconscious
impulses.
Carl Gustav Jung
talked about the collective unconscious
from which spring strangely consistent archetypes and synchronous
phenomena. Every culture commemorates
those spooky super-coincidences. Jung
said the collective unconscious
contains the sum of every forgotten thought and all of those in the
future. Meanwhile, each conscious mind bears a careful
assortment of current thought. Or
receives and converts it like a finely tuned antenna?
Might some
psychotics have their antennae tuned to slightly different frequencies? Could this be why primal societies did not
marginalize them, the way we do today, but valued them instead? Because they were tuned to alien FM stations
instead of AM reactionary talk shows, and their outlandish output could turn
out to be handy in a pinch?
Where do these
ideas come from? I submit that the
Collective Superconscience distributes them.
The collective
unconscious would be more like a storage battery: transitory and mutable,
subject to the limitations of human thought and geography. Whereas the collective superconscience would
act more like a fluid (a magneto-hydrodynamic plasma?) circuit board that would
operate in parallel with human communities, and diagram the flow, accumulation
and dispersal of their currents—burning out certain circuits and allowing
others to propagate in size and complexity.
Let’s hope our
few peace circuits multiply and intertwine luxuriantly while our many weapons
circuits short out without effect. I
believe in miracles at the hands of our Loving God. The rest is up to us.
Emile Durkheim evoked the collective
conscience as an intangible social framework from which criminal activities
stray, rather like the out-of-bounds lines of a ball game. These transgressions (“How could he do
that!”) reinforce normative rules most of us live by, that bind us more closely
together.
World peace could
crop up in this manner.
Noam Chomsky
proposed a Universal Grammar: that we are all somehow hard-wired with language
skills. Just don’t use this text as an
example! Jung talked about racial
memory: the ability of a people to retain facts about its past. Hinduism and other religions mention an akasha: a universal etheric field that
imprints a record of past events, per The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and
Fable, Elizabeth Knowles, Ed., Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 17.
I’m just skimming
these topics; humanity has barely scratched their surface and has forgotten
what it knew about them in the past.
Future Learners will study them in depth. There is a fantastic potential here. Scientific breakthroughs that could eclipse everything we’ve
discovered up to now: vaccines for our cultural ailments and shortcuts across
our technological labyrinths.
Other researchers
have studied morphic fields that
bathe living tissue in auras, rather like those captured by Kirlian
photography. Morphic fields might
explain the peculiar way germ plasm achieves unlikely symmetry and blueprint
speciation.
During billions
of years, chemical reactions frothed a primordial stew of organic molecules shot
through with lightning bolts. From this
shocked broth emerged entities more and more complex until, after eons, the sea
bottom was littered with—player pianos!
Imagine how much simpler this scenario would be, compared to the
evolution of life. I can’t recall the author of this anecdote (J.B.S. Haldane?). His
example involved IBM Selectric typewriters: splendid tools, soon to be
forgotten. But this illustration fits
in too well here to pass up—even without proper attribution.
Without these morphic
fields, the dominant life form on Earth might have been a fifteen-foot layer
(so sunlight could shine through it) of translucent slime wrapped around the
globe. Such a layer might not have left
a trace on Earth after its disappearance; and it might have lived for eons
(intermittently or continuously) without our noticing.
Something else
promotes a far richer, more mobile and adaptive diversity within a finite
toolkit of inheritable traits. After
all, slime mold and humans share the same four DNA nucleotides and 64 codons
formed from them, whose shifting patterns and assembly codes distinguish every
Self from every Other.
Some unknown
field must cast a cloak over every organism―keep it alive, whole and
distinct from the rest of the world, yet attach it and us to the world in
profound ways.
The greatest
Jewish Learner of the Kabbala was called Isaac Luria, (Yitzhak Lurya יִצְחַק לוּרְיָא, Yitzhak Ben Shlomo Ashkenazi, and Yitzhak
Ashkenazi. He is also known as Ari אֲרִי
and He-Ari ("The Lion") from the acronym for Ashkenazi Rabbi Itzhak
("The Ashekanic Rabbi Yitzhak"), thus Arizal with "ZaL"
being the acronym for Zikhrono Livrakha ("of blessed memory" or
literally "let the memory of him be for a blessing"), a common Jewish
honorific for the deceased, and known as Ari Ha-Kadosh ("Ari the
Holy"). I name him so completely
for two reasons: 1) to honor his humble genius; and 2) so that search engines
point those interested in him to this text.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Luria
Translating Luria in simplistic terms on behalf of Learners, he posited the principle that God created the Universe by making room for it outside of His Perfection; somewhat the way a man would inhale sharply to make room for someone passing him along a narrow corridor.
According to
Luria, a shock took place during this transition, which induced the dichotomy
between worldly good and evil. The
Divine Light that had formerly filled all things, flowed from Adam’s eyes, nose
and mouth: a Light the material world could not handle. Three upper vessels of the Universe cracked
and seven lower ones shattered in a shower of Holy Sparks. Those elements that resisted this shattering
became Evil, while those that took part remained Good.
I believe that
the conflict between good and evil is a fusion reactor that energizes the
material Universe and the DNA of life that’s perched within it. Without good nor evil, no power from their
conflict, absolute zero everywhere.
Which may be the point of the exercise?
According him,
every time another human being obeys a commandment of God, he ‘repairs the
world’ and raises another spark from the depths of evil to the heights of
good. Jewish ritual life is intended to
raise the utmost good, no matter how trivial the act of obedience. Correspondingly, any deviation from the
commandment of God drops another Spark to lower levels. In this way, the practicing Jew carries out
an existential struggle equivalent to the myth of Sisyphus, bearing Holy Sparks
upwards to the Light despite a cascade of downward ones showering on him and
his burden. And God has a cosmic need
for humanity to restore His Holy Order.
What might this
mean for the rest of us? That we should
obey the commandments we understand best from any God of our choosing, to
restore the Holy Sparks of God to their proper place. The foremost among them, “Do unto others as you would have them
do unto you;” including, among its subsets, “Thou shalt not kill;” and
governing every religious law we know – whether upheld by an honest Pagan,
Kantian, agnostic or atheist – would best be served by working hard for World
Peace.
http://www.pasarel.org/main/kabbalah/kabbalah.htm
http://www.wordtrade.com/religion/judaism/kabbalahR.htm
Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, in Secrets
of the Soil: New Age Solutions for Restoring our Planet, Harper Collins
& Row, 1989, assert they’ve discovered devas. These devas have identified themselves as spirit architects of
various plant, animal and other living communities—in other words,
communicating forms of the morphic field we are talking about.
New-Age
naturalists admit to having communicated with them at Findhorn and
elsewhere. By their account, more and
more abused by humanity, these devas have withdrawn to their last brambles of
wilderness to await our mechanized self-destruction. Apparently, they would rather communicate with sensitive
naturalists among us and rebuild a mutual framework of understanding and
cooperation; the one we’ve spent the last few thousand years trying to rip
out.
This, provided we
reciprocated with love. Love, in this
context, means pragmatic care, empathy and forethought at which our species
excels; not the vapid sentimentality, reductive positivism and dogmatic
hypocrisy we’ve been led to mistake for the real McCoy, these days.
Forswearing the
devil’s bargain of near-term abuse and long-term annihilation, Learner and deva
mutualists might strengthen their partnership.
Let’s assume we chose to heed them and follow their best-practice
advice. Peace technology Genetic
Architecture
could generate unheard-of abundance while avoiding transgenic catastrophes
and unintended consequences. Otherwise,
if Genetic Engineers persist with
their double blind fumblings, they will merely spawn deadlier weapon
technologies with ‘unavoidable’ disasters as their fallout. The omnicide that threatens to engulf us
will become inevitable.
Rupert Sheldrake
sails fearlessly beyond this thought horizon.
In The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance & the Habits of
Nature and A New Science of Life: the Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance
he postulates the existence of morphic
resonances. Among other things,
they make it easier to do whatever has already been accomplished.
For example,
randomly selected students find it easier to solve crossword puzzles the day after
they have been published in newspapers and many other people have solved
them. The same students take
significantly longer to solve the same kinds of puzzles before the
public gets to see them. Unpublished
control puzzles are no simpler or harder to solve over time.
Or just recall
the four-minute mile: a routine accomplishment among Olympic runners these
days, though once thought impossible.
I am pretty sure
the writing of this text (especially in French) became easier for me –
indirectly – as strangers read through it and noticed my errors, even though
they never told me about them. I am
pretty sure that our delicate minds are bundled in mysterious and imperceptible
assemblies.
In short, good
habits become easier to accomplish after they’ve been practiced elsewhere—and
bad ones, more difficult to abandon, the longer and more often they’d been
indulged in.
Up ‘til now,
humanity has practiced obsessive-compulsive warfare. From now on, we must practice an equivalent peace. Willing co-conspirators with WeaponWorld,
we’ve bleached the term “world peace” of its emotive power, let weapon mentors
cheapen it into the punch line of a stale joke. From now on, we should turn warfare into a topic of sick jokes
and wage peace in deadly earnest.
As another example,
periodic solar flares kindle auroras in polar skies; sometimes they fry
electrical grids and satellites, curdle the albumin in our blood and turn
passive crowds into angry mobs. There
is no escape from their effect except sixty feet or more underground.
Collate the dates
of solar flare maxima on Earth and mass outbreaks of violence; you may find
their correspondence for yourself.
What appears to
be the ‘undifferentiated vacuum of space’ through which our solar system
drifts, is actually a pea soup fog of subatomic particles/wavicles precisely
attuned to the minute disturbances of distant celestial emissions:
electromagnetic, gravitational and no doubt more subtle emissions that haven’t
been registered yet. This varying mix
and quantum flux of space-time and beyond, reaches down through our protective
atmosphere and planetary magnetic shielding, with crafty effects on our
thoughts and behavior.
Five thousand
years of astrologers have barely scratched the surface of those effects. For three hundred years, astrophysicists
have not even bothered to notice them.
Such intellectual sloth disguised as ‘scientific method!’
It was not for
nothing that Newton burned out like a candle during the last few years of his
life. He was trying to reformulate astrology into a rigorous mathematical
science—minus half the planets, moons, asteroids, etc., undiscovered until
after his death. A hero’s project worth
dying for, even if left unfulfilled.
Likewise, Johann Kepler and a succession of equivalent geniuses lost in
the depths of time. This mathematical
guideline would have eclipsed mere Newtonian physics and cubed the value of his
legacy. It could become accessible to
Learners the moment they devoted enough time and scientific attention to it.
Just as genetic
adaptation and human myths sway to unfelt breezes, so I believe we interact
with ethical fields that surround us, even (especially!) when we refuse to
notice them. Often, these fields
corrupt entire peoples, tempt elites into perilous self-indulgence and
terrorize those few who choose to resist them.
This kind of
horror took place in Assyria, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda and around your
neighborhood’s mass grave site (you’d be surprised how close by). Monstrous misdeeds – unthinkable under other
circumstances – became the norm. At
other times, public compassion and grace propelled entire nations to greater
heights of social complexity.
We may be lucky
and clever enough to witness a new wave of global enlightenment. God knows, we’ve witnessed a glut of the
bloodier kind: enough to kill or sicken everyone involved.
These trends are
visible effects of the collective superconscience. We have chosen to let these invisible forces stampede us where
they will, and declared them nonexistent by popular agreement. If we were slightly smarter, we would search
them out fearlessly, cultivate the most useful ones and redirect the worst
along their least toxic axes. This
topic is just beginning to be studied under the title Noetics. See Rupert
Sheldrake, above and elsewhere.
Finally, this
text invokes PeaceWorld: the antithesis of compulsive,
trial-and-recurring-error WeaponWorld.
We have trapped ourselves in the morphic resonances of post-industrial
warfare, redundant and perfectly replaceable on PeaceWorld. We should think of this place as a planetary
theme park carefully crafted to enchant its active architects as much as its
passive occupants, with no-one left outside unwillingly.
I repeat: that is
up to us.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld
to PeaceWorld