Random Thoughts on a Snowy Sunday Morning

Photo by Michelle Perry 2013 Montemezzo, Italy

It’s snowing.

You know what I find amazing? That during the darkest months of the year, crystals fall from the sky, turning everything a bright, reflective white, filling the space and sky with refracted and diffused beams from the low sun.

Balance. It’s so perfectly balanced. Summer: direct sunlight, lots of it, hot, dry, colorful life. Winter: indirect sunlight, lots of water in crystalline form, diffracting and magnifying the little light there is WHILE storing water to saturate the earth in preparation for the dry, hot, lively summer.

It’s like a purification, everything frozen and cleansed and simplified, reduced back to its roots, killed even. And then from that cycle of purification and reduction and simplification and death, new life bursts forth in spring, fed by the death of the old.

Fuckin’ incredible.

Totally unrelated – A question came to me this morning:
Why aren’t there different species of humans?
Why is there only one species?

There are different species of everything else. Insects: millions of species. Birds: about 10,000 species. Monkeys: somewhere between 230-270. (More on the lack of exact numbers later).

So why only one type of humanoid living on this planet today?

It seems a little weird.

I believe a lot of weird shit. Spiritual shit, divinity, channeling, the Law of Attraction, the effects of energy and vibration. I’ve been reading more into the fringe lately – ie about the the Pleiadians. I’m not entirely sold on the story that alien/reptilian beings that are messing with the earth, though I suppose I do believe in other dimensions and it’s kind of silly to believe in that and not believe there are other beings that I might not be sensitive enough/capable of seeing mucking around in the affairs of this little, ignorant planet.

BUT, I’m not entirely sold yet. I believe the things that resonate with me as truth, and for now, that stuff doesn’t really resonate with me. That we’re all divine expressions of creative consciousness, yes, that resonates. But aliens and reptilians who have sinister plans… I wonder if that’s just not our fearful ego-based selves projecting and giving form to things our limited minds can’t yet comprehend in a way that makes sense in our mythology.

Anyways, one species of human. I consulted google. Obviously I’m not the first person who’s wondered about this. BBC wrote an article about it, explaining in a rather arrogant fashion that Homo ergaster, Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis all died out between 30,000 to 12,000 years ago.

One thing that gets me riled up is how scientific theory and hypothesis is presented as fact. We don’t actually KNOW. I think that scientific writing should be presented as such: THEORY. We believe, we imagine, we theorize, it seems possible that… statements of possibility and imagination, not fact. We don’t have facts. We have imaginings. We have stories. We have theories. The understandings of science is continually in flux; it is not a stable ground on which to construct our imaginings of reality and of ourselves.

Science is a story we tell ourselves, a way to understand the mystery of reality. Much like religion. It’s a set of beliefs, of assumptions, of theories. I don’t believe it should be treated as something different than religion.

Definition of Religion: an organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values.

Well, science is also an organized collection of belief systems, cultural systems, and world views that relate humanity to the physical world and the Universe; but in an attempt to separate it from spirituality and moral values.

There’s a fascinating course from UCLA called “Science, Magic and Religion,” 21 lectures given over the course of a semester that discuss how and why science, magic and religion were separated in recent history, and the implications. I found it on the on OpenCulture.com (fantastic for curious seeker gluttons like us). You can download the course for free from iTunes.

I won’t even get into the politics and economics of our broken scientific system, and the paradigm-shifting multi-reality particle/wave/observer effect of the quantum path. Let’s ignore the placebo effect, and I’ll just touch briefly on the problem with the scientific method: the decline effect, discussed in this article in the New Yorker, which posits that “many [scientific] results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.”

“It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.

“For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to “put nature to the question.” But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.”

Let’s go back to species. Seems simple, right? Like something science comprehends, something we understand, something there shouldn’t be any confusion or mystery about. Species.

How many species on the planet? “This number is very difficult to assess, but the discussed range varies from tens of thousands to billions.”

Tens of thousands to BILLIONS!?! That’s a pretty huge fucking gap.
As I touched on before, here are a few numbers of currently identified species (this number is given to change: 9,998 birds, 5,490 mammals, as many as 10–30 million insects.

We can’t even scientifically assess and comprehend the species currently alive, dying, and evolving on our planet, right now; and we think we can understand and explain a few million years of evolution of the modern man?

Or the Universe?

NASA has a daily photo website. Oddly, the image they posted on January 20th 2013 was of an ancient chunk of something man-made, dredged up from a shipwreck in the Mediterranean sea in 1901. It seems to be from the ancient Greeks. And it appears to be some form of an early computer.

Where the hell did this come from?! Thanks for giving me more questions, NASA!

According to our society’s currently commonly accepted scientific “truths” (assumptions) about the linear history and evolution of man, it’s impossible that this technology existed when it did.

From NASA’s site:

“Explanation: What is it? It was found at the bottom of the sea aboard an ancient Greek ship. Its seeming complexity has prompted decades of study, although some of its functions remained unknown. X-ray images of the device have confirmed the nature of the Antikythera mechanism, and discovered several surprising functions. The Antikythera mechanism has been discovered to be a mechanical computer of an accuracy thought impossible in 80 BC, when the ship that carried it sank. Such sophisticated technology was not thought to be developed by humanity for another 1,000 years. Its wheels and gears create a portable orrery of the sky that predicted star and planet locations as well as lunar and solar eclipses. The Antikythera mechanism, shown above, is 33 centimeters high and therefore similar in size to a large book.”

This thrills me, because it brings the mystery of it all into sharp, real, in-your-face focus.

What if everything we think we know is wrong? Everything we assume we know about history; everything we believe about ourselves? All the stories that we’ve been taught are reality… What if they’re wrong? What would it mean for each one of us, individually, in our lives? I love this because it calls in the power of our imaginations. It begins to break through the limitations and boundaries of what’s accepted. Maybe what we all knew to be true as children but were educated out of believing is what’s really real – Maybe magic is real, and science is telling the lies. Titillating.

This kind of blog is what happens when I wake up early and decide to spend the first half of a Sunday doing whatever I feel like doing, which also included: yogaing, meditating, dancing around to the remix of Ascension by Maxwell, making some collages in my Life Vision book using images of Greece, Bora Bora, and pretty paper, drinking some yerba mate, listening to the Life Visioning techniques of Michael Bernard Beckwith, as summarized by Brian Johnson, and periodically stepping outside onto my front porch to be dusted with damp snowflakes and take deep fresh lungfuls of frigid, snowy Italian countryside air.

Scientific Censorship + Creating Reality

A year ago I had lunch with one of the first geneticists to come out against GMOs in the ’90s, a little spitfire of a woman named Dr. Mae-Won Ho. After releasing a  report criticizing GMOs, her funding was revoked, her lab was shut down, and she was removed from her position.

Unfortunately this sort of thing happens much more frequently than you’d think would be possible in what is supposed to be an ‘objective’ discipline.

I was reminded of this today while watching climate scientist’s James Hansen’s TED talk today:

“[White House] Energy Policies continued to focus on finding more fossil fuels… I decided to give a public talk criticizing the lack of an appropriate energy policy. This led to calls from the White House to NASA headquarters and I was told that I could not give any talks or speak to the media without prior explicit approval by NASA headquarters.”

‘Science’ is not necessarily objective. It is political, and above all, it is commercial, paid for by people motivated by profit. Though I suppose it’s silly to separate the political from the commercial anymore.

Those scientists who speak out against the general consensus and status quo are often censored or alienated; in that way today is not much different from Galileo’s age, were it not for the existence of a free internet (for now) through which people can much more quickly share and access the truth. Ok well that and the fact that it’s no longer legal to set someone aflame for heresy.

Why am I writing about this? I generally espouse the belief that we create our own realities through our focus, and that it is pointless to waste energy on negativity.

So maybe it’s pride, I-told-you-so, yet another story that illustrates the views I’ve presented on this blog, on Facebook, and in conversations over the last few years.

Maybe it’s awareness – if you are aware of what’s behind the illusions and lies of this material world, you can choose something different. The contrast between what is and what you want can give you the power/energy/motivation to get active in creating what you want.

Where I take issue is with focusing on all of the negativity in the world, posting articles and rants and missives, but not DOING anything about it in one’s own life.

I am trying to live in a way that is aligned with my values, and the strongest of which is living in alignment with the natural world, both for selfish and altruistic reasons. I decided a few weeks ago that I would prefer to live somewhere without cars. At first I was researching intentionally or historically car-free cities; and then the opportunity to live on a ranch in Patagonia popped up, so I took it.

If health and beauty and nature and the environment are important to you, as they are to me, what actions can you take, wherever you’re at, to live in ways that align with your beliefs? Can you ride your bike somewhere instead of driving? Can you make an adventure out of navigating the public transportation system in your city? Can you begin to minimize your consumption of products in general, ALL of which indirectly consume oil via plastic and shipping, and contribute to the destruction of our planet?

I suppose that my reason for focusing on the discouraging yet inspiring stories of people like Dr. Mae-Won Ho and James Hansen is to see what exists now, clarify what I want for myself and my world, and begin to take action that will move me in that direction.

So: What do you want your world to be like? And what choices can you start making that will take you there?