SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
Every child is
subject to aversion training against peace.
As a result, we grownups refuse to sort our information politics into
their weapons and peace components, and reject world peace in our lifetime.
I cut
correspondence short with a so-called "progressive" who concluded, quite
pleased with himself, that World Peace would never happen until at least forty
years from now: the time it would take to eliminate his responsibility for it,
since he would be retired or dead by then.
According to him, people are just not ready for it; they’re not graced
with the superior morality he is obviously endowed with…
I won’t name him,
out of mercy. After all, his is 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 weakest party would be harmed, Learners should
mercilessly call out the responsible party by name, regardless of the
consequences, as long as those weakest were shielded from further harm.
In a PeaceWorld
Agora, infinitely more elegant than WeaponWorld, anyone responsible for human
suffering would be stripped of power. Guilt
and regret for one’s misdeeds should become a preventive measure—no
matter how much that might cost in the meantime. The current practice of disguising one’s
failures in anonymity should 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 the steadfast conscience of 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 assassinated
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
Many more state-sponsored
murders have gone unnoticed by the Western Press. Russia won’t regain its slava (glory)
until it starts protecting their replacements as deliberately as it sacrificed
impulsively those listed.
Dispatching those
national treasures and discouraging their imitators by acts of sheer terror
would be unthinkable for legitimate leaders of these states. On PeaceWorld, this disgrace would have
thrown them out of office without appeal.
Yet on WeaponWorld, they thrive from their inconceivable transgressions. They are not alone on WeaponWorld, on the
contrary. Almost every current ruler
would lose his war crime trial before the World Court.
Compared to most
of those I've reached out to, this guy was rather optimistic about the prospect
of world peace. Here is how this
planet’s sad burden of weapon stalwarts sorts itself: an overwhelming majority
which 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 work!
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
do-nothing ‘progressives’, good for nothing but wringing their hands and
whining about how nasty people and current events are.
Take your time,
Bubba: the next forty years or the last five thousand; your results will be the
same in any case. Weapon mentality will
always prevail at the expense of you and your progressive hopes, because you
will never step forward to champion peace, despite all your fine talk.
World peace will
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 judiciously: by design,
voluntarily and soon.
Reactionaries
won’t touch this topic because it betrays their primary motive and motivator of
others: fear. Fashionable progressives
(equally fear struck) dismiss this topic as talked to death and thus neatly
support the reactionaries—despite all their fine talk.
This text studies
the mentalities of weapons and peace as if they were discrete, coherent and
self-willed entities (memeplexes). Their
schemes contend, grow strong or weak over time and influence mass thought. Peace and weapon mentors are spokespeople for
invisible but potent 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 legitimation of government. 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.
For Western
philosophers, it grows from the bottom up: from the individual to the heights
of government power. The Chinese and
their oriental disciples talk about the “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 into individual
depths.
Each is
considered mandatory for good governance by its supporters. I suspect that 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 the three levels and suffer corresponding
disaster as the system shook itself apart.
Without the general will, we would sink into chaos; without government
power, things would fall apart, à la Democratic Republic of the Congo; without
the Mandate of Heaven, mass rebellion would become mandatory.
The central
tuning fork of this harmonic system would be government.
Freud
spoke brilliantly of the subconscious. Personally, I am unaware of it (just kidding). Nowadays, everyone
realizes 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 holds a careful selection 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 valued
instead of marginalizing them, the way we do today? 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,
limited by pinched modes of thought and human geographies. Whereas the collective superconscience would
act more like a fluid (a magneto-hydrodynamic plasma?) circuit board that
operates in parallel with human communities, and diagrams 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, and 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 criminals 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
grow up in this manner.
Noam Chomsky
proposed a Universal Grammar: that we are all hard-wired, somehow, 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 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 am just
skimming these topics; humanity has barely scratched their surface and
forgotten what it knew about them in the past.
Future Learners will study them in depth. There is a fantastic potential here. Scientific breakthroughs might eclipse
everything we’ve discovered up to now: vaccines for our cultural ailments and
shortcuts through our technological labyrinths.
Other researchers
study 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 in a primordial stew of organic molecules
transfixed by lightning bolts. From this
shocked broth emerged entities more and more complex until, eons later, 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 any trace after its disappearance and might have lived for eons on Earth
(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 cloak 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 him in simplistic terms on behalf of Learners, Luria 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 down a narrow corridor.
According to
Luria, some kind of trauma 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 vessels 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 powers the material
Universe and the DNA of life that’s perched in it. No good and 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 that
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 – be it from 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 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 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 form a stronger 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
and ‘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 it and noticed my errors, even though they never
told me about them. I am persuaded 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 habits, 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. One
cannot escape their effect except sixty feet or more below ground. Collate the dates of solar flare maxima on
Earth and outbreaks of mass violence; you may find a 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 objects: electromagnetic, gravitational and no doubt more subtle
emissions we haven’t registered yet.
This varying mix and quantum flux of space-time and beyond, reaches down
through our protective atmosphere and planetary magnetic shielding, and has
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
haven’t even bothered to notice them.
Such intellectual sloth disguised as ‘the 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, many 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 its legacy. It could become accessible to Learners the
moment we 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 took place
in Assyria, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda and around your nearest mass
gravesite (you’d be surprised how nearby to you). Monstrous misdeeds – unthinkable in 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.
All 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 will. 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-repeated-error
WeaponWorld. We have trapped ourselves
in the redundant morphic resonances of post-industrial warfare perfectly
replaceable on PeaceWorld. We should think
of it 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