Tweak of Nature

The human race is collectively and universally suffering from an undiagnosed disease.

No human is exempt from it; not the loftiest guru nor the remotest aborigine. (At least that is my belief. I have often hoped someone would prove me wrong on this.)

There are many symptoms that we all share.

We talk to ourselves constantly, mostly about ourselves, for no good reason. We can't stop talking to ourselves if we try! There are techniques to allow the mind to quiet itself, so we can access the innate knowledge of our world that should be natural to us, but they bring only incremental victories. One full second of silence is a big achievement!

We behave as if we are alien to our own planet. This is reflected in many ways, not the least of which is our casual wastefulness and destructiveness. Though we think we are the 'highest' of anmals, we miss signals that the animals never miss. Some years ago, there was an avalanche that wiped out an Indian village in the high Himalayas. A number of the villagers were saved because they were chasing cows, who knew to run away from the village! When the Great Tsunami hit, all the animals that could were seeking higher ground. What were the humans doing? Talking to themselves about themselves.

With this continuous skull-chatter we falsify our own memories. Our conscious memories do not match those of the body. They never do, as far as I know. And as far as I know, with all other conscious animals, conscious memories, body memory and even racial memory (what we call 'instinct') are never in conflict or contradiction.

It is said that we use only 10 percent of our brains. Why? What holds back the other 90 percent from being used? What would it do if we could use it? And why aren't most of you mad about this?

Because we are universally ill, we have no idea what 'human nature' actually is, but speak of it as if it were a curse on us.

It could be a disease, or more like a syndrome or mental illness, or possibly even a parasite - that's Carlos Castaneda's theory, and I find it pretty compelling. It doesn't convince me, though; nothing has convinced me yet. I do appreciate it when I find a thinker who at least understands that we're in serious trouble here. Most of us are in denial, and believe absurdly that we are the 'Crown of Creation', though we're always much more devoted to destroying, or that we are subject to the will of a vast ethereal humanoid entity caled 'God' or 'Bog' who actually gives a damn about our miniscule petty rivalries, and interferes with them, though he's supposed to have created the entire universe in which we are less than a speck.

There is much more to say here, and I'll be referring to all these notions more in the future. To close, I want you to reflect on that speck, and how it is the only speck in that incomprehensible vastness that we know to contain any life. We must know that life is as rare as anything anywhere, and the energies that mold it and drive it are the most complex and sophisticated known. Our world is proof of extropy, not entropy. Yet so many of us constantly speak fearfully of overpopulation, and secretly wish for flood or fire to purge the earth of all those we consider inferior to ourselves....

Wittgenstein, with his brilliant opening, "The world is the only condition", summed up in one unerring blow why most philosophy is nonsense. I am willing to go further and say that we humans are in no condition to judge the world. Any philosophy that ignores or obscures the fact that we are unnecessarily engineering our own imminent extinction is essentially worthless.